Insomnia Coach® Podcast

Today, I’m talking with Farrukh — someone whose experience with insomnia slowly began to take over more and more of his life. At first, sleep wasn’t something he thought much about. It was just there. Something that happened naturally. But over time, that started to change. Nights became more unpredictable. Sleep felt less certain — and it began to consume his attention. He started noticing how he slept. Then thinking about how he slept. Then worrying about how he might sleep. And from there, things escalated. Nights became something to prepare for. Something to manage. Something to try and get right. He began experimenting with different routines, adjusting his environment, and doing everything he could to improve his sleep. Everything he did was understandable. But instead of making things easier, the ongoing effort put more of his time and energy into sleep. It became something he had to figure out — something he had to fix. And that pressure started to spread beyond the night. Sleep was no longer just part of his life. It was starting to shape it. In this conversation, Farrukh shares what began to change when he stepped away from that constant effort and started bringing his focus back to living his life. He talks about what that looked like for him and how that change in direction freed him from an ongoing struggle and got him to a place where sleep is no longer a big deal at all. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin: Okay. Farrukh, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Farrukh: Thank you. Hi to you and hi to everybody i’m really excited to be here and I look forward to this conversation. Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s just dive in and get started right at the beginning. When did your sleep problems first begin and what do you feel caused those initial issues with sleep? Farrukh: The sleep issues, initially began with some other things happening in my life that I was a bit stressed about, that I was a bit worried about, and that worry creeping into sleep initially. Farrukh: But after it creeped into sleep for one night, two nights, three nights, then the worry started attaching to sleep in itself. It almost felt like I’ve lost the ability to fall asleep and then it started to become a huge problem. Martin: So at first there was some worries or some stresses going on in your life and when you noticed some sleep disruption, at first it felt, okay, this makes sense why I am struggling with sleep a little bit because I’ve got all these worries going on right now. Martin: But then as the sleep disruption continued over multiple nights, the worries then became more about sleep than whatever might have first triggered the actual sleep disruption itself. Farrukh: Exactly. I think after your brain sees multiple experiences of it happening, then it becomes a loop. And then you feel like there’s no way out. And I’ve lost the ability to fall asleep. And you ask the people, you ask your friends, you ask your father, you ask your mom, you ask your friends or whatever. Farrukh: Because they have not experienced it. Because they have not faced it. For the most people, I would say. Like they would say things like, no, probably you were not that really tired. Or, and people say, try to fall asleep, right? So get into bed and try to fall asleep. Do your best to fall asleep and you will. Farrukh: And then you try those things and they don’t work. And you feel like, why can they sleep well? And why can’t I sleep well? And it has been a month, it has been two months. And then you worry about your sleep and then you worry about that, oh, I’m not being able to fall asleep now I can’t do my work now I can’t exercise now I can’t earn money now I can’t study. Farrukh: So then a loop starts over because now you’re worried about if I don’t sleep well, what would happen? And your mind started, starts attaching to that. And then the more you try to fall asleep so that you could fix those things, the more you can’t sleep. Martin: You just encapsulated how this can all snowball so easily. There’s that trigger for the sleep disruption. And then you, as the sleep disruption continues, you find yourself trying to fix the sleep issues, which makes complete sense is completely understandable. You notice a problem, you wanna fix it, right? Martin: And then the more you try to fix the sleep problems, the more difficult they seem to become, the more these thoughts and these feelings show up. And then it progresses, you had the worries about whatever the triggering event was, then you have the worries about the sleep, then you have the worries about the consequences of sleep. Martin: And in amongst all that, there’s just more and more trying, more and more effort and you’re just caught in this big loop, just seems to grow and become its own kind of monster. Farrukh: Yeah. It also does not feel good because you feel like you’re working hard, so hard for something that other people can do so easily. Farrukh: And you feel like, why can’t I? Then you start to have that comparison. Then you start asking people and I remember every day I used to be like asking people like, how many hours do you sleep? Farrukh: How many hours do you sleep? And then I would wake up in the middle of the night just checking my phone to see how many hours I have slept. I had to sleep eight hours. Farrukh: I started dreading waking up at night. I hope I don’t wake up in the middle of the night because then it would be so hard to go back to sleep. Martin: I think it’s human nature to compare ourselves to others, and there can be two sides to that, right? In some ways it may be it pushes us to be a stronger or a better person, and in other ways it can not really serve us very well. Martin: And sleep is perhaps one of those things where that comparison often doesn’t prove to be very helpful, although it’s understandable. Because as we are gonna no doubt dig into a little bit more, sleep isn’t really within our direct control. So when we compare our sleep with others, we can then be inclined to put more effort into sleep and that tends to create more struggle and sleep just becomes. Martin: I feel like what you touched upon there, it becomes almost like a judgment of who we are as a person. We attach it to our self-worth, there’s something wrong with me, there’s something broken. How comes these people are all getting a certain amount or type of sleep and I’m not. And that just then piles on all the pressure on all the harsh self-talk, which doesn’t usually make things any better. Farrukh: Absolutely. And then like you said, you start to judge yourself on it and you start to look at it like somewhat of a test. Farrukh: Okay, let me get into my bed, let me try to fall asleep and let me try my best if I’m able to fall asleep, okay, I was able to fall asleep one and a half hours, but I’m still not falling asleep for eight hours or seven hours. Farrukh: I’m failing. So you start to feel like it’s like you have to perform and prove to yourself and it’s some kind of performance and you have to make it the best, the perfect it can be. And then that judgment comes in. Farrukh: The harder you are working, the more you’re involving your conscious mind. I like the saying, I read a saying some weeks ago, it says that in all mental workings, effort defeats itself. And it’s not only with sleep, I’ve seen it with other things as well. It’s just if right now I try to not focus on the image of a red car and I try my best to not focus on the image of a red car, don’t focus on it. Farrukh: That’s exactly what I would be doing. And I think it’s something similar that happens during the sleep issues. You are in your bed, you’re trying to fall asleep. If you are looking out for every single noise out there that can disturb you and wake you up, I remember I used to say to my family that I’m just closing my door. Farrukh: Please don’t knock. Please don’t make any noise. Even like something like this would wake me up outside. So I was so worried about that there should be no sound that should wake me up because then it would be so hard to go back to sleep. And some people said some things, which helped for a day or two, but then it used to get back. Farrukh: Someone who has faced it himself or herself and has gone out. I feel like only they can help you. Someone who has not faced it, they can never relate to what you’re experiencing. Farrukh: And someone who’s not on the other side already and someone who has not also helped various people get over it. People like that can help but I feel like based on my experiences, people who have faced it and have got on the other side make it the easiest for you to get there. Martin: The advice that we often get from other people is well intentioned but it often just repeats a lot of the stuff that’s already out there, which can just create more confusion, more pressure around sleep. Martin: Like all the sleep hygiene stuff, for example. It’s, it tends to revolve around adding more, doing more in an effort to make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen. It takes personal experience or a really deep level of understanding to get to this point where you acknowledge that it’s that effort that is the actual problem. Martin: And that’s probably the difference between someone who’s gone through the struggle and someone who hasn’t. But what you really encapsulate there, just the way that we can ramp up that pressure, to perform a certain amount or a certain type of sleep through effort, through creating the ideal or the perfect conditions. Martin: And as we ramp up that pressure, just as you said, it just creates this kind of performance anxiety. The stakes just become so much higher. And that in itself just makes sleep even more difficult. Farrukh: That is so true. That is so true. And. Judgment point is a huge thing. You judging yourself on whether it was a success, whether it was a failure. Farrukh: I think that over judgment, and it’s not that sleep is a problem, then the next day you are all your thoughts. It’s sleep. I can’t sleep well. What if I don’t sleep well? Again, even if you sleep well, and this is something that I noticed that working, even if you’re working hard towards getting good sleep and you’re trying to lean your bed for hours and hours, and even if you get an amount of sleep, which is okay, even after you wake up, your mind would again be like, okay, I slept, but what about now? Farrukh: What about the next sleep? Would I be able to fall asleep again? And then these thoughts all over the day became a huge problem. I wasn’t able to work, I wasn’t able to study because I felt like. I need to solve this problem. And I think there is where the issue comes. I need to solve this problem first and then do the other things in my life. Farrukh: Once this problem will be solved, then I will be happy. Once this problem will be solved, then I will start enjoying life. So you start to see it like I’m doing something and without fixing it, I can’t do something else. Farrukh: I did not know how to solve it. I had not watched your videos. I had not gotten in contact with you. I did not know that there was a solution. Martin: I think it makes sense that you are gonna notice your brain focusing on sleep because the human brain is always trying to problem solve, right? Martin: And any time it identifies a problem or even just a potential problem, it’s gonna really focus on that. And part of that does involve a lot of mental time traveling. The brain just focuses on the future, what each next night or each next day is gonna be, or what previous nights were like, what previous days were like. Martin: It very rarely sticks to the present moment. That’s often a skill that we have to cultivate through practice. And you really highlight something, which I hear a lot, is that you just, you feel like you’re never satisfied with whatever happens, so you can have a really good night, and instead of using that as a reminder that Oh, I am able to generate sleep. Your brain immediately time travels into the future and it’s yeah, but what about tonight? Farrukh: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That just becomes a loop, I would say. Yeah. Martin: If you had to describe what an average night was like for you when you were struggling, how would you describe it? Farrukh: I think average night, I would start about it probably from the time, like two to three hours before I had to get into bed. The worry and anxiety started creeping in a lot, although that anxiety worry was there throughout the day. But when I know that, okay, two hours after this, three hours after this I have to go to bed, it was like I could feel something in my head. Farrukh: It was something, it was like someone is trying to squeeze my brain, I’m worrying about it and stuff like that. And you feel so bad ’cause you see that the other people, they are working or doing something and then they come back home and they’re so excited to fall asleep and just rest and stuff like that. Farrukh: And you feel like where people are finding enjoyment, you are finding like fear in that. So I think, and then when the time comes to get into bed, it’s like, it was like a constant moving around in my bed. Okay, let me try to fall asleep like this. Farrukh: Maybe this will help. Let me try to do this. Let me try to do that. And then even you become so much conscious about it that there were times, and I’m sure you would’ve heard this a lot, that you’re trying to fall asleep and then you just notice that you’re about to fall asleep and then you wake up. Farrukh: So you just notice that, oh, I’m going to sleep. And then you see your brain shutting down and the moment you start to see that you’re shutting down, you wake up because you once again pull out that monitoring thing on it. So I had to remember some nights where I did not sleep at all being in my bed, like all night long. Farrukh: Some nights, like 15 minutes of sleep, half an hour of sleep, and then waking up. And then constant worry about I did not sleep well yesterday, how the next night is going to look like if I don’t sleep well, I’m not going to be. And your mind always shows you the worst case. Farrukh: Worst case scenarios, okay, I’m not going to be able to fall asleep again at all. And when that happens, probably I’m going to even die. If I don’t fall asleep for 3, 4, 5 days, I’m going to die. And yep. A constant worry, a constant swinging around in the bed, trying to fall asleep. Farrukh: Like a constant headache, I would say. And yep. Struggling to fall asleep. Even when you notice your mind shutting down a bit, being very conscious about it, and then it wakes you up. It’s like almost you’re looking for, just your mind is super, super alert. Like someone is going to come and probably kill you or something. Farrukh: So you have to be very much alert what’s happening, what’s going around? Am I falling asleep? Martin: I get this impression that at that time it just felt like your brain was working against you. At a time when you wanted to be winding down and relaxing and inviting sleep. Martin: Instead, you found the opposite was happening. Your brain was generating more worries, more anxiety. You, it was like running through all these worst case scenarios and because you identified that as being something that’s not helpful. It can be human nature to then try to resist those thoughts or to try and fight those thoughts, get rid of those thoughts. Martin: And then that pulls you into even more of a battle with them. And then they become even stronger and more intense just in the same way that the more you try to make sleep happen, you’re tossing and turning, trying to fall asleep, trying to make it happen. Find the perfect body position, the most comfortable body position. Martin: And it’s like the more you’re trying, the more you find yourself struggling. Farrukh: Absolutely. Absolutely. Like I said, it even the thoughts then you start to try hard to not have those thoughts. The more you try to avoid those thoughts, the more they come, the more strength they have. Farrukh: I even remember like sometimes not going to work, sometimes not going to my place where I had to study ’cause my brain making the excuse that I have not slept well. So it means that I cannot work, I cannot do this. Farrukh: So you decide not to go to work. Then the anxiety starts creeping in about your work as well. Oh, I’m not just now not sleeping, but now I’m not working. How will I work in the future? How would my earnings look like? How will I take care of my family and then instead of going to work or instead of going to your university or college or whatever it is, staying in at your home, being in your bed, and trying to like toss and turn, not only at night, but also during the day. Farrukh: And I think there’s the concept of you feel like you have to make up your sleep. Okay. Yesterday I slept for four hours. Let me make up for the rest of the 2, 3, 4 hours or whatever in the afternoon or in the morning. And this is something that I’ve heard all my life, like eight hours sleep. And before I experienced insomnia, I never thought about it. Farrukh: But it started impacting me after I started facing it because I was not only judgmental on how I’m sleeping, whether it’s deep sleep or whether it’s not deep sleep, I was so much judging myself on how many hours am I sleeping? Is it five hours, is it six hours? Is it seven hours? Okay. Yesterday I slept six hours, so I should sleep two more hours to make up for the last two hours yesterday. Farrukh: And then you start to make up things like there is something that you like, there is an ideal sleep that you have to follow and you are always trying to catch up. Martin: It just becomes more of a focus and your actions start to be more aligned with this idea that you need to serve sleep rather than your actions serving you and the life you wanna live. They’re now serving sleep, you’re chasing after it. You’re trying to create the perfect conditions for sleep. You’re trying to problem solve and troubleshoot. And that just gives it even more power and influence over your life just as you shared there. Martin: It’s like sleep becomes a battleground. It makes sense that you notice this anxiety growing as the night gets closer, as your bedtime’s approaching because your brain is preparing for battle because it knows that there’s gonna be a struggle about to show up. Because that’s what it’s learned through no fault of your own. It is just doing its job of looking out for you. But that’s just what it’s learned. And then so you’ve got that struggle at night and then during the day, when your actions start to reflect the struggle rather than the life you wanna live. Martin: For example, you might not go to work, and that’s completely understandable. And then at the same time, that can have the knock on effect of more time worrying about sleep. It increases the stakes. Now it’s really affecting your life. You’re not working. How are you gonna provide for yourself, for your future, for your family? Martin: There’s more consequences, there’s more pressure. And it just perfectly encapsulates how this can so easily just take over your entire life. It’s not just a nighttime issue. It’s like a 24 7 issue. Farrukh: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You’re so right about it. And the point that you mentioned about sleep hygiene. Farrukh: Now those sort of videos are good for people who are able to sleep well but are compromising their sleep. But someone who is struggling with sleep, when they start to watch those videos, that’s where the anxiety grows. Martin: Sleep hygiene is really for those who are neglecting their sleep, who aren’t giving adequate opportunity for sleep to happen, or is for those who are sleeping really well, might just be looking to get those final opportunities to optimize the good conditions for sleep. Martin: The thing is, people that struggling with insomnia, they are not neglecting their sleep. They are giving it a lot of opportunity to happen. They’re already clearing the stage as much as they can, putting a lot of effort in, a lot of trying. So the answer there is not usually more trying. By that point, something different is needed. Martin: Sleep hygiene is like dental hygiene. It’s a preventative measure but once you’ve got that cavity, no amount of brushing is gonna fix that. You need something different. Martin: Before we talk about what that different way looked like for you, what you had tried in an attempt to fix this problem? Farrukh: The first thing, the foremost thing, I thought that the more time I spend in bed, the faster I can solve this. Farrukh: So before I used to spend like seven or eight hours in bed. Now I started spending probably 12 hours, sometimes 14 hours, 15 hours, like compromising other things just for me to be able to fall asleep. Farrukh: And you don’t realize that the thing that you’re doing to solve the problem is actually the cause of the problem. Farrukh: Then I thought that the solution to this is make up to sleep, right? I have to make my sleep up. So I would avoid other things. I would not work. I would not do the things that are required of me. I stopped doing the things that I used to like, like my hobbies or things that I enjoy, thinking that I need to fix this first and only then I can reen enjoy the things that I was doing. Farrukh: And only then, for example, at that time I was also working out. And I said that, okay, until I fix this, I can’t work out. So because I have not slept well, it means that I can’t work out. Farrukh: Now it’s not just one problem, it’s impacting a hundred other things. And your mind is I have to solve this one problem before I look into the other things. So I think this is the stuff that I was trying to do, and then during the day, working hard to get rid of the thoughts. I should not think about this. Farrukh: I should not focus on this trying my best, that these thoughts should not come into my mind. And just like we discussed, the more you try, the stronger it becomes as a whole. Martin: There was a powerful statement in there that when you were describing all of these attempts to problem solve and to fix and it was something along the lines of it wasn’t just one problem anymore. As you tried to do more it upon reflection just created more problems. Now, it wasn’t about just sleep anymore, it was about the thoughts that come with it, the feelings that come with it. Martin: The missing work because of it. Not working out, even though working out was important to you. Not doing things that you enjoy that matter to you. So it’s like there’s it, not only are you upping the stakes, but it just creates more problems. It’s not just about sleep anymore, it’s about all this other stuff on top of that. Martin: So as you were deep into this problem solving mode. When you found my work, what was it about this approach that I share that made it feel like this could be a more useful way forward or worth experimenting with? Farrukh: I would say that the first time I saw you, I watched two videos, three videos, and it’s like, you can relate to the things, right? And I started realizing how all the efforts that I’m doing so far are basically just feeding into the problem. Farrukh: And then you, it’s like you hear someone talking about a more relaxed approach to sleep and someone basically talking about not giving sleep that much importance and realizing that you can be good without giving your sleep so much importance. Farrukh: And you start to realize by doing these things or by watching and then trying that, Hey, even if I don’t sleep well, let me try to enjoy my day. Farrukh: Let me still try to go. Let me still try to do the things that I’m supposed to do. Let me still try to work out. Let me still try to enjoy my day. Let me still work. Let me still hang out with friends despite the fact that I’m not getting much sleep. And after you keep doing this for a long time, just like sleep becomes a loop and sleep problems become a loop. Farrukh: After you start to form this new loop and you start to realize that, hey, your brain starts to see, okay, I wasn’t able to sleep, or I wasn’t able to sleep that well. But see still I enjoyed a little more than the last week. I still worked more than the last week. I still had a hangout with my friends. I still did the things that I was supposed to do. Farrukh: Then you start to dismantle this association of good sleep means a good next day. I was watching one of your videos with one of your clients and she mentioned a very good point about your mind attaches to a good sleep means a good next day, and a bad sleep means a bad next day. Whereas it can be the way around as well. Farrukh: You can have a bad sleep and an awesome next day and a very good sleep and a very bad next day. And then the second thing, heavily reducing the time that I was spending in my bed. Farrukh: And then you start feeling more sleepy. And I started to love that feeling that, hey, look, I’m starting to feel sleepy once again because my mind, my brain is now wanting sleep. Farrukh: My mind is wanting my brain, my mind, my body is wanting to, like, sometimes it was dying to go and lay in bed, but I wasn’t doing that because I knew that only this is the time that I have to spend in my bed and that’s it. So during the time when I would go into bed, because now this is something that my mind is now dying to go to bed, whereas before it was dreading that when I go to bed, all these thoughts and stuff like this. Farrukh: Now when I’m not giving myself that much time to rest time on my bed, my mind was like, I want rest, right? I want to lay down. Let’s just lay down for five minutes. Let’s just lay down for 10 minutes. But I won’t. I would save that for the sleep window. Farrukh: You start to trust your natural ability to fall asleep. Your mind starts to realize that, hey, when I feel when the body needs sleep, I will fall asleep. When my body is feeling very, very tired, like when the body is very, very tired, I would go to sleep. Farrukh: And then you would sleep for a few weeks in that sleep window and then you would realize, Hey, I’m sleeping even more so I can increase it even more. I can increase it even more. Farrukh: I started to enjoy my day. So my brain started to get some sample size of, hey, even a bad sleep can have a good next day, can have an enjoyable next day. Farrukh: I can still work. I can still do this. Even if I feel sleepy. I would, let’s say, have a coffee. I would have some tea, and I would still be able to work. I would still be able to enjoy it. And I realized after starting to work out, after starting to work, that, hey, my, I was wrong in letting myself know that I have not had these eight hours of sleep so I can’t work out, I can’t work. I can’t go out and hang out with friends. Farrukh: I started realizing that I can do these things even when I sleep less. And I think that’s the breakthrough point where your brain starts attaching less importance to sleep ’cause now it’s not the most important thing in life, although it’s important, but it’s not the most important. Farrukh: Even if it’s less you can still do what you want to do. Martin: When you found the YouTube channel, you felt heard, it felt like your experience was understood, that it made a little bit more sense, the struggle that you were in. And that offered some reassurance and it also gave you opportunity. It revealed opportunity for a different way forward, a way to break that loop that you found yourself in. Martin: And thanks to your own willingness to experiment, to be curious, to play around with a different approach. You started to bring things back to your life that mattered, things that you’d been withdrawing from. Because of concern about how you might feel or how they might affect sleep, or this belief that I can’t do anything that I enjoy until sleep is fixed. Martin: You flipped out on its head. You were like, okay, sleep isn’t fixed, but I’m gonna do the things that I enjoy anyway. I’m gonna start bringing them back into my life. And as you did that, it meant that even if sleep was still the same, it was starting to lose its power and its influence over your life. Martin: Like you got that sense of power back a little. Even if it was just a tiny bit, you got some more agency over your life again, and you noticed that the quality of your day wasn’t always a hundred percent dependent on the quality of your sleep. Like you could still have some good days or some good moments, or even just some okay moments. Martin: Especially if you gave yourself that opportunity for those things to show up by doing the things that mattered to you by doing the things that reflected who you are, who you want to be, and the life you wanna live. And you also reduced the amount of time you allotted for sleep, which in another way we could just say you stopped chasing after sleep quite so much. Martin: So instead of spending, say 12 hours in bed, you allotted an amount of time for sleep that more accurately reflected however you were sleeping at that time. Martin: Something that people often share as well when they first start to reduce the amount of time they allot for sleep, it can often then become the struggle is staying awake. Martin: Which is quite ironic because someone with insomnia will probably say they struggle with trying to sleep and now it becomes completely the opposite and I’m struggling to stay awake. And what does that mean about your natural ability to sleep? It tells you that it’s still there. We just need to maybe remove ourselves from the process. Maybe it’s all the trying that becomes the obstacle. Martin: I think you really touched on a key point there about how this can influence your identity. When insomnia becomes part of your identity, how that can just make things so much more difficult. And one way you reclaimed your identity was doing more of the stuff that mattered to you. Martin: And that meant that as a natural byproduct of that sleep and insomnia, although it was still part of life, it started to lose its importance. It started to lose its influence over who you are as a person. Martin: Also with all those thoughts and those feelings that might show up during the day, there was less resistance to them, less judgment about what they meant. Martin: You were better able to make some distance between the thoughts and who you are. I’m curious to hear a little bit more about that specifically, like how you actually put that into practice. Because these thoughts and these feelings can be really difficult to experience. They can be really distracting. Martin: I’m yet to meet a human being who genuinely says they like experiencing anxiety and worry and frustration and fear. So how do you put this into practice? How do you stop fighting those thoughts and feelings that you do not want to experience? Farrukh: So the first thing is out of experience. I started to realize that even if I don’t sleep well, I can still work, I can still do all of those things. Farrukh: And then out of experiences, you realize that your mind saying, oh, what if I’m not able to sleep? Well, again, you just go back and let your brain know that yesterday I was able to sleep. And then even on days where I did not sleep well, you start to accumulate those experiences of enjoyment during the next day. Farrukh: See how I was still able to enjoy my next day? And then these thoughts start to lose their power. Farrukh: Sometimes I did feel like I made a mistake of always looking at where I want to be at, how exactly I want my sleep to look like, because that can always make you feel like a failure because you will always feel like, I want that, but I’m still not there. But if you realize, but if you start to look back and realize how much you have been improving over time, that will give you a lot of enjoyment. Farrukh: So yes, look forward towards what sort of sleep you want to have in the future, but also look back at how much you have been improving. How was your sleep like one month ago, and how it has improved. Martin: In terms of dealing with these difficult thoughts and the feelings. It’s almost like there was a direct way in an indirect way, so to speak. So the indirect way just came from the fact that your bed and sleep became less of a battleground. Martin: There was less struggle at night. There was less pressure to make sleep happen. Being awake became less of a threat, so there was less problem solving around it. You were doing more of the stuff that mattered to you each day, so that had the indirect effect that your brain’s not identifying being awake as much of a threat anymore. Martin: So it’s naturally gonna produce maybe fewer or less powerful of those difficult thoughts and those feelings. And then you’ve got the, perhaps the more direct way, which is. Reminding yourself that these thoughts and these feelings are okay to experience that it’s okay to have them. That they’re natural and they’re normal. Martin: They’re not a reflection of who you are. They’re not necessarily facts. You shared that when you draw on your experience, there could often be a discrepancy between what your thoughts were telling you and what your experience was telling you. And by responding with less resistance and having some more confidence or a plan of action in place in how you’re gonna respond to these thoughts in a way that’s not just resistance, they started to again, lose some of their power and influence. Martin: They maybe showed up less frequently. Because your strategy shifted from not trying to get rid of them, fight them, avoid them, resist them. It just became about, I’m gonna maybe acknowledge them, tell myself it’s okay, and I’m gonna respond in a workable way. I’m gonna respond by doing something that matters to me. Martin: I’m gonna respond by bringing my focus back to the present moment, bringing my attention back to wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, or whatever I want to be doing. And the more you focused on your actions, the stuff that was in within your control, the more you notice that you were taking all that power and influence over your life back. Martin: And so that also snowballs and means that, this is less of a problem. Your brain’s not gonna be quite so active trying to fix this for you, generating all those thoughts and those feelings, you realize that there was just less effort required. It wasn’t about doing more apart from like doing more of the stuff that matters to you, but for sleep, it wasn’t about doing more, it was about doing less and just giving sleep the opportunity to do what it wants. Martin: Same with all those thoughts and feelings. It’s not about what can I do about them? It’s about doing less with them, just maybe acknowledging them and then just refocusing on what’s a workable way to respond. Farrukh: Yeah that’s so true. And you don’t even realize when a time comes, when thoughts about sleep just completely go away. Farrukh: Like you don’t realize when it happens, you start feeling like the thoughts start getting less and less and less, and there comes a time and you look back and you’re like, Hey, I’m not, they have been a few days and I’ve not thought about sleep at all. How much I’m sleeping or how my next sleep is going to look like, or any thoughts about sleep in that regard. Farrukh: When you, when there’s that moment of realization, that moment of realization is also quite enjoyable in a sense. And I know many people worry about, I’ve seen some people on the web that have gone onto the other side, but that I have seen some people worrying about relapse. That what if it happens again? Farrukh: What if it comes up again? For me, that was not the case because now it was like, you gave me something, now I know how to solve it. Even if it happens, I know what to do about it. So I did not experience those thoughts of what if it comes back? It’s just you never worry about what if you’re not able to, let’s say, tie your shoelaces because you know that even if you mess up, you can once again change the way you’re tying it and it’ll be fine. Farrukh: So that started happening with me during sleep, like the thoughts related to sleep as well. I realized that now I’m having great sleep. I’m back to where I wanted. Now I’m probably enjoying my sleep even more than the other people. Even if this is something that comes back later in life because of something, it’s a very easy thing to solve based on the things like even if it comes back, I’ll still keep enjoying the things that I’m doing. Farrukh: If I feel like I’m not being able to sleep well, I will just reduce my time a bit in my bed. So you stop fearing about what if it comes back again? Because now you know there’s a way to address it. Farrukh: Sleep starts becoming less of a big deal. So I realize that, I noticed that I’m on the other side of it when sleep was no longer a big deal to me, so it wasn’t like I have to achieve something. Farrukh: I moved like my country and I had some things to do. There have been nights where I’ve just gotten two hours of sleep, three hours of sleep, and I did feel sleepy the next day, but it was no longer that, Hey, it’s insomnia. I cannot sleep well again, and stuff like that. Farrukh: Because now it was like, okay, I wasn’t able to sleep well. I will be able to sleep well the next night. And now even if a thoughts like, oh, what if I’m not able to sleep? Okay, I’ll just have some tea. I’ll just have some coffee the next morning. I’ll still do the things that I need to do. It becomes like not a big thing at all. Martin: You feel stronger and more resilient because of this experience and because of the skills that you’ve been practicing and developing. Martin: So even if and when nights of less sleep happen again in the future, you know a way of responding that isn’t gonna create more difficulty and more struggle, that’s just gonna keep you heading in the direction that you want to be heading. Martin: When nights of less sleep happen, they are nights of less sleep. They’re not, insomnia has returned. You’re not adding anything more onto the actual experience. You’re just acknowledging whatever the reality was. And that’s it. I think that’s important because insomnia isn’t a night or a few nights of sleep not happening as you want it to. Insomnia is struggling with sleep. Martin: That’s really what it comes down to. So for as long as you’re able to respond to sleep not happening as you might want it to, and all the thoughts and the feelings that can come with that, with less struggle, really insomnia can never regain that foothold in your life because you’re not struggling, you’re not engaged in that battle again with it. Farrukh: Yeah, if I don’t sleep well it was just less hours of sleep. Farrukh: I don’t even call it a bad night, like just less hours of sleep. Some days have more hours of sleep, some days have less hours of sleep, some days have average hours of sleep. Farrukh: And I realized that I’m no longer worried about what if a noise wakes me up, because now even if a noise wakes me up, I’ll just rest once again. And I know my body trusts itself now that it’ll fall asleep once again. Farrukh: And then there’s a thought that came, I’m not sure if it was an unconscious thought, I started to enjoy my rest more than my sleep. So my mind started to feel like even if I don’t fall deep asleep, at least I’m like resting in my bed. Martin: Resting is an action, so it’s something you can control versus trying to make sleep happen, which is something that’s not in your control. Martin: And so when your goal is, I’m just gonna rest, not only is that beneficial because rest can be quite restorative, especially versus struggling, but it can also, when you’re resting and not putting all this effort into trying to make sleep happen, it can also just naturally make conditions for sleep a little bit better too. Martin: How long would you say it took for you to get to this point where it felt like you were free of this ongoing struggle with sleep, that you could just live your life independently of whatever kind of sleep showed up and whatever kind of thoughts or feelings might show up. Farrukh: Sleep was something that I started to really dread during my journey with insomnia, I would say. But after I started doing the things that we just talked about, I started to feel like my emotions towards sleep, it started to improve. Like I started to feel good emotions. Farrukh: Another mistake that I was trying to do is I was trying to fix insomnia so that when I wake up the next day, insomnia is completely gone. Farrukh: But when you realize that it’s a process, i’m gradually improving. I’m slowly moving forward. My thoughts started to change around it I think by three months time I was at a point where sleep was no longer a big thing. Farrukh: But you still realize that after you start to have enough sleep, you have some thoughts regarding sleep. Farrukh: It’s good that it takes time, because see, if you could solve it in one day, it means that it can also get back in one day, right? Farrukh: So the point that it takes time is because it takes time, because it’s long lasting, it’s going to end the rest of your life. That’s why it’s taking time. Farrukh: You enjoy the process when you see how far you have come and you don’t just keep looking at where you want to go. Martin: Was progress constant improvement night after night, week after week, or were there lots of ups and downs, what did it look like for you? Farrukh: Definitely like any other thing in life, ups and downs. There are days even after you start the process where you feel like. See, I tried another thing and it also did not work right? There are some thoughts that it’s not working. Probably like Martin helps the other people out there, but it’s not for me. Farrukh: I’m unique. My case is different, right? You still have those thoughts, but visualizing the progress. It was more like this. It was up and down. But if you see the next high was always higher than the previous high, so it was like down and then back up again. The overall movement was going upwards. Farrukh: I would define it like that. So yeah, if you have some downs, if you have some really bad nights of sleep, you have some thoughts. There could be some days where you feel like, oh, those thoughts are back in the game and I’m still struggling with it, and all of that. That’s very normal. That’s very usual. Farrukh: Still keep doing what you are doing and don’t just keep switching things. Okay, that’s not working. Let me try this. Okay, now that’s not working. Let me try this. Because people often just try something for one night, for one, two nights and then switch on to something else. Farrukh: There would be days where you feel a bit discouraged, but just realize that it’s normal, it’s usual. Still keep doing the things. And you still keep moving forward. Martin: Yeah. Those downs or those dips are really just opportunities to reflect on how you wanna respond. They can be disappointing and frustrating. Martin: Your brain can fire up and tell you, oh, this isn’t working. You are this unique person that this is not gonna be helpful for. But really what they are just opportunities to reflect on how you wanna respond, because it’s your response that matters. Your experience already tells you that sleep itself is out of your control, but how you choose to respond is always within your control. Martin: And just acknowledging that can be really powerful and empowering. What does an average night look for you these days Farrukh, if there is such a thing? Farrukh: I look forward to sleep now. I look forward to having a good rest now. I look forward to having an enjoyable night regardless of whether I sleep or not. Farrukh: It’s no longer deciding my days it’s no longer a big deal. Sleep is no longer a big deal at all. Martin: How is your daytime life different now compared to when you were tangled up in that struggle with sleep? Farrukh: No longer seeing yourself as a successful person or a failure based on how much you’re sleeping. Not looking back at your previous night. And looking at how many hours you slept or what happened or what did not happen. Farrukh: During my struggle, I used to ask some people like, how many hours do you sleep? And oftentimes people don’t know because people don’t look back and that’s what you start to notice with yourself once you start to move forward, that during the daytime, oftentimes you won’t even know how much you slept because you would just wake up and you would start to do whatever is required of you instead of like looking back and having to check your phone, okay, I have slept for these many hours, or I should make up, or I should do this, or I should do that. Farrukh: I do every other thing that I enjoy in my life. Like I’m doing my masters, I’m walking, and then I sit with my friends, like joke around, play around sometimes doing the hobbies, doing the things that I like and. Yeah, and sleep is no longer a decider into what I do the next day. If sleep happens, I do this if sleep does not happen, I do this whether sleep happens or whether sleep does not happen, I still do the same things the next day. Farrukh: So sleep is no longer like the deciding factor of what’s going to happen the next day or what I’m going to do or what I’m not going to do. Martin: You’ve got your life back from insomnia. Farrukh: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That’s the sentence that summarizes everything that we’ve talked about. Martin: Farrukh, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and to share your whole experience from the start of the struggle to the depths of the struggle to your emergence and your transformation. Martin: I know it’s gonna be really helpful for a lot of people. I do just have one last question for you. And it’s this one. If someone is listening and they feel as though they, they’ve tried everything that they are beyond help, maybe they’re that unique case, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them? Farrukh: I would say that everybody feels like they’re unique and somehow their problem is unfixable until you start to do things and stick with things for a while. So if things have not been working for you, the things that we have been talking about so far, either you might not be doing it the right way. Farrukh: Or you have not done that enough in order to judge whether it’s working or not. Sometimes we don’t do that enough and we constantly keep switching between things. Okay, this is not working. Let me try this. Trial and error is a very good strategy, but once you try something, you need to give it time to see its effects. Farrukh: You need to give it time to see how it’s working and once you start doing it for some time, and notice once again, whenever you judge yourself on how much you’re improving, judge yourself on how much you are improving actually, and not only on where you want to get. Because even if you’re improving slightly, even slightly, and that slightly could mean having even a very small bit good emotion towards sleep than before. Farrukh: Or having a little bit more sleep than before or enjoying sleep or rest or whatever, a little bit more than before, or being able to enjoy your day a little bit more than before. Even that should show you that it’s working. It’s just a process that you need to follow for some time. ’cause if you keep looking for where you want to get, then you might look like then always everything will feel like it’s not working because you will always be like, okay, but I’m still not there, but I’m still not there, but I’m still not, yes, you’re still not there, but perhaps you are further from where you were when you got started. Farrukh: And this gives you confidence. This gives you motivation, so stay on it, stick with it. This is something that’s going to make you learn a lot about your mind. This is something that once you’re on the other side, you’ll enjoy sleep even more than you used to do before. Farrukh: And I know it’s hard to say or it’s weird for someone to sound to hear this, that it. For me, it often feels like a gift that I got and I got to learn so many things about it. Now I can sleep well as well. Now the things that I learned, I can apply to other things in my life as well. I know it feels weird to hear this once you are struggling with it, but once you’re on the other side, you start to really see what Martin means when he talks about these things. Farrukh: So stick with it. It just takes some time, but you will get there. Martin: Great. Well, thank you again, Farrukh, for the time you’ve taken to come onto the podcast. It’s really appreciated. Farrukh: Thank you, man. And just before we go, I would say that I’m very, very grateful for you, for all the work that you’re doing, and I just wish you the best of luck. Just keep doing whatever you are doing. Farrukh: I just wish your work goes out to more and more people and I hope that you keep doing this work and you keep impacting more and more lives, as many as you can moving forward. Martin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Farrukh: Thank you. Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to get your life back from insomnia, I would love to help. You can learn more about the sleep coaching programs I offer at Insomnia Coach — and, if you have any questions, you can email me. Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Please share this episode!

Courtney’s experience with insomnia didn’t start overnight — but when it hit, it hit hard. Looking back, she could see some early signs. As a child, she was sensitive to her environment. New places, travel, small changes — sleep didn’t always come easily. But it wasn’t something that took over her life. That changed in 2020. With a new baby, the stress of the pandemic, family tension, and untreated anxiety, everything began to build at once. Then the nights started to change. She began waking up in the early hours of the morning, wide awake. At first, it was confusing. Then it became frightening. The moment she noticed she wasn’t asleep, panic would take over. Her heart would race. Her body would react as if something was wrong. Nights became something to fear. Sleep became something she felt she had to make happen. She tried everything — supplements, routines, changes to her environment, and eventually medication. But nothing brought consistent relief. Her days started revolving around sleep. Avoiding things. Planning everything around the night ahead. Trying harder, doing more — all in the hope that sleep would finally come. But the harder she tried, the more difficult it became. What began to shift things for Courtney wasn’t another strategy — it was a different way of understanding what was happening. A realization that nothing was broken. That her body already knew how to sleep. And that the struggle itself might be what was keeping her stuck. From there, things didn’t change overnight. It took time. Practice. Setbacks. Learning how to respond differently to difficult nights and the thoughts and feelings that came with them. But slowly, something began to change. She started trusting her body again. Sleep became less of a battle. And instead of her life revolving around sleep, she was putting more of her energy into the things that mattered to her each day — and insomnia lost its power and its influence. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin: Okay, Courtney, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Courtney: Thank you very much for having me on. Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning as always. When did your sleep problems first begin, and what do you feel caused those initial issues with sleep? Courtney: So I think what caused the insomnia battle that I dealt with was some background things that got, had, had gone on in my life. For example my mom has always struggled with sleep, so I have wondered if there’s a genetic component to that. Even as a kid, I’ve just always been more sensitive to my environment. Courtney: For example if I went to a friend’s house, I wouldn’t sleep very well. There was times I’d have my mom come and get me because I wasn’t sleeping. Probably get really anxious if the, if we’re traveling, I don’t sleep well, if the room is too hot, I don’t sleep well. Just things like that. Just very sensitive to shifts in my environment. Courtney: And then in 2020 is when I began my battle with insomnia. What also added into that was just some unhelpful beliefs about sleep that I just picked up from the media. Courtney: For example, like I feel like there’s a lot of times that they’ll do a study or they’ll release an article that doesn’t tell the full story, but is enough to cause fear in you about insomnia. So for example, if someone doesn’t get seven to nine hours a night, that could lead to whatever catastrophic thing or. Courtney: Insomniacs are, you know, shown to struggle with, you know, fill in the blank there. So I had that kind of fearful mindset already. And then yeah, you just add in. My husband and I had our first child in 2019. Around that time I was struggling with an un untreated anxiety disorder, and I was trying to muscle my way through that. Courtney: And then, as you know, the years progressed. We had some family and relational tension and my husband has some job changes due to the pandemic that happened, let alone the pandemic itself and the fear around that. So there was just a lot of lifestyle changes at that time that I think I had a hard time with, and I just never slowed down to kind of process that or make space for that. Courtney: And I think my body was trying to communicate that to me through anxiety, but I just didn’t slow down to listen. And then it, it. Overflowed into a, a sleep disorder or insomnia right around 2020. And I’ve struggled with that for quite a few years and finally I’m in a better place where I feel like I can talk about it having been on the other side of it. Martin: So it sounds like for you, concern or a focus or issues with sleep was always something that was kind of with you, maybe perhaps more in the background. It would show up every now and then, but then in 2020 around then there was lots of change going on. Lots of stresses, lots of different stuff happening and so the sleep issues resurfaced, but this time it felt different. Courtney: Yes. There was just a few nights that I started waking up at like 3:00 AM just wide awake. And I was like, huh, this is weird. And then it started getting more and more frequent, and there was a few nights that I did not sleep at all. And what shifted was my focus on it and my fear around it. So I started becoming very fearful, like, what is wrong with me that I can’t sleep? So as that fear grew, I started to become more fearful of nighttime. Courtney: And it was on the week of Halloween. There was a few nights that I, I didn’t sleep at all. Like, I would lay down at night and I, I lay there for maybe about 15 minutes or so, and it’s like, as soon as I was aware, oh, I’m not sleeping yet, I would instantly have a panic attack. I mean, I was sweating, my heart was racing. Courtney: I was in full panic mode. I had my, I called my dad up ’cause he lives, you know, nearby. And my husband stayed with our son and I had him take me to the emergency room at about 3:00 AM just panic stricken. Courtney: And I didn’t even know, I just, I needed help and I didn’t know where to go. So he took me there and I mean, I went in and I was just like, I just can’t sleep. I, I can’t sleep. And I’m sure they thought. You know, I was on something ’cause they ran a full drug screen and of course that came back clean. I was just panic stricken, severe anxiety. Courtney: But it probably looked to them like I was taking a stimulant of some kind. ’cause how else, like, would I end up there? Not able to sleep. But unfortunately, like they didn’t really have any answers for me. I remember talking with the nurse and just telling her my story and she acknowledged, she’s like, you’ve been through a lot of life change and, you know, that can contribute to this. Courtney: But there was no real like, help. I think they gave me two Benadryl and I think that made me doze off for an hour in the ER while I was waiting to be discharged. And I think that only came from the fact that they were treating me for something like they were taking care of me. So I feel like I could like come down a little bit and then went home and I don’t think I slept the rest of the night after that. Courtney: The next morning I think I crashed on the couch for maybe an hour, and then the following Thursday, I ha ended up having my husband take me into the emergency room. ‘Cause we had stayed at my parents’ house that night and so they were with my son and my husband took me in and I was again just begging them to help me sleep. Courtney: Prior to that I was able to get in with the local psychiatrist’s office and I think I went to them that Thursday and, you know, they gave me medication and they gave me an anti-anxiety medic medication. And then also she called it a heavy hitter sleep medication. I think it was Restoril, which is an older generation drug. Courtney: And I was like, okay, this will do it for me. And she was pretty confident. She’s like, well, you know, put you on this for a very limited time, maybe two weeks. And we’ll see how that goes. So I went home that Thursday night and I took it and it didn’t help. And I, so I can’t even tell you the fear, the shame, the confusion of, they gave me a heavy hitter as she put it, sleep medication. Courtney: And that was not enough to help me sleep. So hence, I, I ended up back in the ER and all they could do was give me another dose of that, just because I think you were allowed to take two and that was the maximum. So I, from then on, I was taking the maximum dose of that much longer than the two weeks. And so I felt completely just weak, broken alone, confu, I mean, anything you can think of in a dark season like that, I felt it because I was like, this is not helping. Courtney: Like this is the strongest that they have and this is not enough to knock me out, like, what is wrong with me? Martin: Well that was a really difficult situation that you were going through. And so the way it sounds like it was different, apart from the obvious in terms of the visits to the emergency room, was when the sleep issue showed up. Martin: This time around, they, they felt different. Like you were waking up during the night and sleep just wasn’t getting back on track like it was in the past. So that led to some understandable concern ’cause you’re a human being. But then the more that concern raised. Perhaps there was like more pressure to make sleep happen, more effort to make sleep happen more trying. Martin: And then that in turn just made it more difficult until it reached this crescendo where you’re just kind of, you can’t try any harder. And then we’re told, well, this, this is the most powerful medication we have. This will make sleep happen. And when that isn’t working, especially after you’ve been told that, then you’re feeling really alone out of options. Martin: Confused, scared, as you said, you can feel broken and it just makes it just even so much more difficult and scary. Courtney: Yes. And so what even made it worse was I was back in the psychiatrist’s office a few days later and I think she was very concerned that I had to take the maximum dose. And that it wasn’t helping. Courtney: So on top of that, on top of the anxiety medication, on top of the heavy sleep medication, she prescribed a anti-psychotic, not because I was psychotic, but because it was also used off-label as a a sleep to induce sleep. So she’s like, maybe this com, you know, combined with the Restoril, will help you go back to the one pill, the one dose, and then you don’t have to take the two. Courtney: We can get you off of it faster. Well, I wish that was the case, but I still had to take the two, I had to take the anti-psychotic and I was on it longer than the two weeks. So then that snowballed into fear of dependency on the medication. And I will say I was dependent on it because it got to a point where if I even thought, okay, maybe I can try to not take it tonight, I would instantly have anxiety. Courtney: So. After, after, you know, the, the hospital trips and the trips to the, the psychiatrist, I, the medicine did help temporarily. There was a couple nights that knocked me out for like 10 hours. So I was taking everything that they gave me and I, I got some sleep, but it was like, one night would be 10 hours and then the next night, you know, I might get four hours and then another night I would make that up, like my body would sleep longer. Courtney: So it was kind of like a rollercoaster of sleep. I just had the hardest time getting balanced again. Martin: So it sounds as though you felt just really dependent on all these different medications. But at the same time you felt that this was just unsustainable, like continuing to take this much medication, especially when it wasn’t even generating consistently good sleep for you. Martin: But as far as you are concerned, you had no other options. Courtney: Exactly, yes. And so it was hard because the, the other feelings, it wasn’t just about the sleep anymore. So there was nights that I would get up and just go for a walk around our neighborhood at like 3:00 AM And I, I remember thinking, this is like so weird how like, physically I am up walking in the dark when everybody else is asleep and I should be asleep, but I can’t. Courtney: And then emotionally I’m in the same place. Like I’m dealing with something that no one around me knows what to do with. I, you know, I remember talking to family and friends and even my husband just like, you know, they were telling me, oh, have you tried melatonin? Have you tried lavender? Have you tried CBD oil? Courtney: And I’m like, yes, I’ve done all of it. But they just, they don’t know. And I remember my husband saying maybe try not to think about it. And so then I’m like, okay, maybe he’s right. Courtney: Maybe I just need to not think so much about it. And that’s when I was, I lay down at night and I would try to control my thoughts and I would try to, I started changing my environment because I was of course researching everything, being a problem solver. And I’m like, okay, so I need to, you know, wear the blue light glasses. Courtney: I need to not drink coffee afternoon. I need to do all, all of the things that, you know, I’m sure many people have talked about with you that you’ve discussed on your channel that other people have done. Like I did all of them, but the intention behind them was to induce sleep. So every time I did those things, it backfired. Courtney: And I think those things are, can be helpful if you’re trying to relax your body. If you’re trying to. I was actually just talking to my dad about this. He asked me about like a, a sleep supplement. I’m like, well, if you’re trying to, you know, support your body, great, but I think it can backfire. If you’re trying to induce sleep, if the goal is to make yourself sleep, that can be very problematic. Courtney: And that was my case. So it was just a very lonely place of people suggesting things and telling me things, and I’m like, I’ve done all of it. None of it works. Something’s wrong with me. Like I, I remember thinking my, something in my brain must have just broke. And when you look online about insomnia outside of the community that you have created, there’s not, there’s nothing that’s helpful. Courtney: So it was just, it was a very lonely place of trying to navigate this until I came across your channel. Martin: You made an insightful point there that all the things that you did for as long as the intention was to make a certain amount or a certain type of sleep happen. It was going to backfire because sleep is out of your direct control. Martin: But when you were going through this struggle, was, was that insight present? Like did you realize at the time that the more your intention was focused on trying to make sleep happen the more you seemed to struggle? Or was it more of a case of I’ve just gotta keep trying, sooner or later I’ll find something that works. Courtney: Yes. So initially I think I was just so frazzled that I was trying anything and everything, and I mean, I, it took me quite a while to come across your channel. I was looking at different, I was researching things, I was looking at different videos and for me personally, my faith is very important to me. Courtney: So I was looking thing, looking for things through that lens. And the first thing that I came across that was even a little bit helpful was there’s, there was this guy who was talking about his struggle with insomnia, and he talked about the importance of surrender. Courtney: And just for him, you know, he talked about just surrendering everything to God and giving up and not trying so hard. And that was enough for him. And I’m like, okay, I can, you know, I can do that. I can surrender. And, you know, I did have a night where I was like, all right, you know, if I’m never gonna sleep again, I can’t help it. Courtney: Like, I, I give up and, you know, but for me, and that helped for a little bit. The surrender or the acceptance did help for a little bit. But for me, I just, I needed more information. I’m someone who, I, I love to know the why behind why I’m doing things. I love to, you know, learn as much as I can. And so when I finally stumbled across your channel, you explained everything with the why behind it, why in insomnia develops, why your body’s doing what it’s doing, why your efforts are failing. Courtney: And I’m like, okay, this is, this is filling in the gaps that I have needed in order to move forward. Martin: Mm. So perhaps it’s education, perhaps that educational component of it. A greater understanding of where insomnia comes from, what keeps it alive, what gives it power and influence just felt reassuring. Martin: Now things started to make sense for you. Maybe you didn’t feel broken anymore. You realized that you weren’t broken, you were just stuck. And I think you made a good point too, because when we hear people talk about surrender or acceptance. That, that can be a new option that’s available to us. And like you said, you experimented with it but without that kind of understanding on, you know, why is this helpful? Martin: How is this helpful? It can make it harder to commit to that kind of approach. Courtney: Exactly, exactly. And so it was frustrating because like, everything that I was looking into felt like just a bandaid. And it, it, it was hard because the things that I was doing was not helping, like, it wasn’t addressing the root cause. Courtney: And, you know, I, I did everything I could. I had, there were nights my husband would stay up with me to talk with me. I had people praying for me. I was praying about it, like trying all the supplements and nothing like, you feel just helpless. You’re like, I’m doing all the right things. And in my mind, or in the way we’ve learned in our culture is if you try harder. Courtney: You will get results. Well, I’ve learned with anxiety and I’ve learned with insomnia, the opposite is true. The harder you try, the more your body’s like this is not gonna work very well. So it took me a while to get to that point, but I feel like once I did there was so much more freedom and I was able to take that pressure off. Martin: One thing that you touched upon earlier was how this wasn’t just an issue at nighttime, it would also be present in the daytime as well. When you were still tangled up in this struggle, how was this affecting your days? Courtney: It consumed my thoughts. So in the morning, okay, so for example, nowadays, like if I’m having a rough day and maybe I didn’t sleep well, I will tell my husband, Hey, you know, I’m having a rough day. Courtney: I didn’t, I maybe slept, you know, four or five hours, just bear with me. But back then. I would get up in the morning and be like, telling everybody, oh my gosh, I only slept two hours tonight. Last night I only slept an hour. I didn’t sleep at all. I was telling anybody and everybody just desperate. And my entire day looked like cultivating the day to support the night. Courtney: So not drinking coffee after noon, as I mentioned. Not over exerting myself because I didn’t wanna overstimulate myself to keep myself awake at night. There were times I stayed at home more often and just kind of avoided the things that I normally enjoy. I started worrying about what I was eating. Courtney: I started worrying about like how much screen time I had. I started worrying about how much I was outside. You know, anything that you can think of. Like I was doing all of that in order to try to provide myself the best opportunity to sleep that night. And it never worked. Martin: It’s almost like sleep or insomnia was in charge of your decisions each day. Martin: And so all your actions were intended to serve sleep rather than serve you and the life you wanted to live. And so not only was this kind of maintaining that struggle because none of that stuff really had much influence on sleep anyway, but it was making things even more difficult because then you’re getting pulled away from doing the stuff that’s important. Martin: Doing the stuff that matters, like through no fault of your own because you’re a problem solver, you’re trying to fix this. But it’s just a, a really clear illustration of how easy it is to get pulled into this struggle. And to find it consuming your attention, consuming your life, and just becoming increasingly more difficult the more you try to deal with it. Courtney: Yes, exactly. And it’s, it is just, it’s crazy how you can’t, like, you can’t even help it. It’s not like you’re intentionally trying to do that. You’re just trying to survive in that moment, and that’s what happens. Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of what needed to happen. So it’s just, it’s, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Courtney: It is such a confusing and lonely and just disorienting space to be in when you’re struggling with insomnia to that level. And then on top of that, it took me a while to realize that like the, the brain fog or forgetfulness or irritability or whatever I was struggling with during the day wasn’t necessarily because of the sleep that I lost. Courtney: It was because of the anxiety that was consuming me as well. Martin: Yeah, it’s, it’s just so difficult, isn’t it? Um, You mentioned that you listened to a podcast episode where someone talked about moving away from the, trying, from trying to make sleep happen, and that kind of prompted you to explore a new approach. Martin: So as you dove into that, and now as you reflect on that journey, what were some of the changes that you made to your way of approaching sleep and responding to insomnia and other thoughts and the feelings that can come with it that helped you move away from the struggle and got you to where you are today? Courtney: So definitely the education behind your videos, like the, the early videos that you’ve posted. I found that so helpful because I remember it was like a big breath of fresh air when you said something like insomnia is not the same thing as sleep deprivation. Therefore it doesn’t have the same effects and. Courtney: The second thing was your body is wise in that it will make up the sleep that you need through deep sleep. And even if you’re not getting the full eight hours that you would like to get, your body’s going to get the sleep then it needs. So it allowed me to kind of take a step back and be like, whoa, if I just, if I just let my body do what it is designed to do, maybe I can get back on track. Courtney: And so, yeah, just the, the, the initial moments of just surrendering to that and letting go and trusting the physiologic, the physiology of my body is what helped me to kind of loosen my grip a little bit. But I will say unfortunately for, well, in my mind, unfortunately it took a lot longer than I would’ve liked it to. Courtney: I would call that week of no sleep traumatic for me. I, I don’t use that term lightly, but I say that because I’ve come to learn that our bodies keep the score of things like they remember. And there are nights even now, you know, five years later where if I, I’ll be okay for a night or two, but if I go a little bit, you know, maybe three days more of just struggling, those, those fears start to creep back in. Courtney: And my body, it’s almost like I’m back in 2020 and I’m like, oh, okay, are we going back here? And that’s where, you know, for me, it helps to get out of bed to kind of separate myself from that environment and then go back downstairs. And I found coloring before bed during those times to be really helpful. Courtney: So I’ll get like an adult coloring book with like, you know, the intricate designs and I will sit there and color and that calms my body down. But allow, it also allows those thoughts to just be there, but I don’t have to pay attention to them. Something else that has been helpful is if I’m really struggling with like thoughts, I would just get my phone out real quick and I will just journal ’em. Courtney: I will just type ’em all out and there’s been nights I can’t even finish, finish journaling before I fall asleep. So there’s different, you know, tools and things I can do now to support myself to not go back to that place. But it took me a very, very long time. And a lot of, you know, I’ve heard the term relapses or setbacks or however you look at it, you can look at it as like, okay, this isn’t just another opportunity to take care of myself. Courtney: This is another opportunity to try to implement what I’ve learned and grow and teach my brain through behavior that I can move past this point. You know, I don’t have to go back to 2020, but it, it takes a long time. At least it did for me. Martin: Yeah, absolutely. I always like to think of this different approach as being skills-based. Martin: And so like with any skill, it’s gonna take time to get better at that skill, and it’s gonna require a lot of practice, a lot of ongoing practice. And there are gonna be times where it feels that that practice is useful and helpful. And there’s gonna be times when it feels like that practice isn’t doing anything. Martin: But what matters is just continuing to get the practice in if developing this new skill. Is important to you. And I like how you shared the, the educational component of it was just so reassuring that you learned that you don’t need to intervene with sleep. Like you don’t need to do anything to make it happen. Martin: Your body wants to take care of that by itself. So that just immediately takes so much of the pressure off, right? You don’t have to do anything anymore. With that, once you’ve got that understanding, I mean, is that, is that what that felt like for you? Courtney: Oh, yes. And it’s interesting how like. And the health circle of things like, you know, sleep gets grouped in with like, if you want to eat healthier, do all these things. Courtney: If you want to exercise, do all these things. If you wanna be healthier, do all these things. And then sleep gets thrown in there, like, make sure you’re getting your seven to nine hours. Make sure you’re practicing sleep hygiene and it gets grouped in there. But that’s the only thing that doesn’t work with effort. Courtney: So it took me a long time to unlearn that, that okay, sleep’s the one thing I can just, you know, take, take my hands off of it. And I found that to be true with other people that I’ve known. It seems like the best sleepers I knew were the people that like could sleep by the, like my husband could sleep by a campfire outside, like, no, doesn’t need anything. Courtney: And so it’s those people that don’t even try that seem to sleep the best. Martin: Yeah. And that’s another great insight, isn’t it? Is just looking to what other people are doing. Especially those people that seem to have no issue or concern around sleep. They get great nights almost every night. What are you doing to make that happen? Martin: You ask that question, you kind of get this dumbfounded look right as they try and figure out what they’re doing, because the answer is they’re not doing anything. They’re just setting time aside for sleep to happen, and that’s it. So perhaps all this messaging around sleep, you know, get seven to nine hours of sleep. Martin: Maybe it should be make time for sleep, you know, make sufficient time for sleep. The issue is the people who are reading that kind of advice are the people who are struggling with sleep and then, and people with insomnia are often allotting even more time than necessary for sleep. And then setting themselves up for more wakefulness at night. Martin: So it’s, it again, it’s just so easy through no fault of our own, to just get pulled into this struggle with the kind of messaging around sleep that is predominant. Courtney: Yes. Yep. And then you add in the, the, like the fear behind it. Like the fear-based, if you don’t do this, this will happen. So then you feel even worse. Courtney: Like if I don’t, if I don’t get sleep soon, something bad’s gonna happen to me. So that’s why like during that week, I remember at one point I told my husband, I’m like, I just want them to admit me to the hospital. Check me in, send me up to, you know, the mental health floor wherever I need to go, and just, can they just knock me out? Courtney: Can I just sleep? Just to get, you know, get back into sleeping again. Because I thought if I don’t do that, I’m, my health is gonna self-destruct. Like this is harmful to my body, which puts you into fight or flight even more. And then, yeah, just the shame of, like I said, like walking out at night and looking around at the world and it’s dark and everybody’s sleeping and you’re like, what’s wrong with me? Courtney: Like, something’s wrong with me, that I’m not like everybody else, that I can’t sleep. And so that’s a whole nother component to this is those thoughts that creep in when you do lay down at night. And for the longest time I was just trying to control them. Like, don’t think about that. Think about something else. Courtney: Like try to be calmed down. I was trying to breathe, you know, do all the things and I learned, you know, through, you know, your resources that just letting those thoughts be there and let ’em float away, you know, just don’t get too over involved with them. That can relax your body. So you can go to. And then, yeah, another thing that was kind of counterintuitive was the sleep restriction, but that I think had the biggest impact for me is because I was trying to allot aot of time for sleep, but I was going to bed at like nine o’clock and I’d lay there for an hour and a half and that would just increase the anxiety to where I’m like, okay, what’s the minimum sleep I can get? Courtney: And so I would go to sleep at like, or I’d go up at like 10 or 10 30 when I noticed my eyes were actually drowsy and I would lay there and some nights I would fall right asleep. If I didn’t, I got back up and came downstairs. But that is what helped me to actually be tired enough to go to bed. But again, the message is, well, you have to, you know, you have to make sure you’re getting enough sleep, so you have to go to bed early. Courtney: And it just, it creates such a mess for people. I, ugh, I just feel bad for anyone going through it right now because I know I, I’m not too far removed to forget what that feels like. Martin: Absolutely. And it comes down against that theme of the more we chase after sleep, the more elusive it becomes. Martin: You mentioned that one thing that was really helpful for you was to open up a little bit more to whatever thoughts and feelings were showing up compared to trying to fight them, avoid them, resist them, control them, reason with them or anything else with them. And I think the, for a lot of us, this idea of opening up to what can be really scary, difficult, and uncomfortable thoughts and feelings can itself feel really scary, difficult, and uncomfortable. Martin: What was your experience like with that? What showed up for you when you first heard of this approach of opening up to this, these really difficult thoughts and feelings? Courtney: Oh my goodness. I just, I instantly flashed back to just laying there in bed with all these crazy thoughts in my head, but making time to allow that. Courtney: And I just remember thinking like, oh my goodness, if I do this, like, I’m gonna end up even worse. Like, I’m gonna end up even further into insomnia if I allow all this, all these feelings, and I don’t do something to try to calm them down. And it, it makes so much sense because as I’ve learned with anxiety slash insomnia, it’s that the more you try to control things, the worse it gets. Courtney: Because your anxious response is to get you to do something like it. Your body thinks it’s in danger. So the more you respond with trying to grab a hold of it and like do something, it’s gonna get worse. Where if you just kind of say, all right, I’m okay. I’m gonna lay here as uncomfortable as I am. Courtney: This is terrible, but I’m just gonna lay here and let them be. I’m gonna let these feelings be here over time they do pass. So it took, again, it takes time. I still have to practice that, but I’m much better at it than I was. But it does take time. Martin: it is definitely an ongoing practice. I think to get better skilled in experiencing the full range of human thoughts and feelings with less resistance making space for them to exist. I’m curious to hear from you what that first night or what the first few nights were like when you tried to practice this new approach of making space for that stuff to show up compared to that default response of resistance. Courtney: So it was. It was very, again, I would say a rollercoaster in those hours of like, you know, 10 30 to seven or whatever, I was in bed. Like initially I would be like, okay, this is uncomfortable, but I’m gonna try this. And I would try it and I would fit, I, I would feel myself relaxed and I would calm down. And then a new thought that would really jar me would come in or a new feeling. Courtney: And I’d be like, and then I’d have to do it again. So it was constantly, constantly grabbing a hold of those thoughts and being like, okay, you know, I’m just gonna let this be here. I don’t have to believe this, you know, this is what my body’s feeling, but my brain. And it helped for me to separate myself a little bit or create some distance between my, my identity and my brain. Courtney: Like my brain is the one, you know, churning out all these crazy thoughts. ’cause my body doesn’t feel safe right now. And that’s okay. That’s okay. But I am safe. I’m just gonna lay here. That would work and then I’d have to do it again. So it was a lot of rep repetition over and over. It wasn’t like a one and done, like tonight’s the night, I’m gonna challenge my thoughts or allow them to be there, or you know, breathe and calm down and I’m good. Courtney: It was repetition over and over again. Martin: That’s where I think a lot of us can give up because we can still have that, whether it’s, maybe it’s a little bit hidden away in the background or more of a covert goal of I’m practicing this in order to get rid of these thoughts and these feelings. So every time they kind of pop back you’re like, ah, this isn’t working. Martin: So I’m curious to hear from you with that very common experience of, I opened up to the thoughts, they felt like they were starting to lose their power. I got a little taste of how this could be helpful, but then again, another one would come in and I’ll be back to square one again. What prompted or motivated you to keep up with that practice to feel as though this was an approach that you wanted to commit to and develop skill in? Courtney: I would see incremental progress. Like I would see little glimmers of hope that I was working my way out of this. So, for example, like I said, with the emails, like I did see through the, the email practices I was putting into place, I would see incremental progress there. And I would do that with the thoughts as well. Courtney: And then there was a point where I, I just kept going back to, well, I can’t go back to the way it was because that got me nowhere. So there were weak moments where I’m like, I just needed, you know, I need to go back to trying harder, trying all the things, or maybe I should try different sleep medication. Courtney: And I would be like, well that didn’t get you anywhere. That’s not getting to the. So I think I would love to say it was this big, profound moment of like, breakthrough, but it really was just incremental progress that I saw in myself. Like I’ll never forget the one night I was sitting on the couch and I was drowsy because I had implemented sleep restriction and I was color, I was doing something calming before bed. Courtney: My husband and I had the TV on. I was just coloring and my eyes got drowsy. And I was like, normally at this time I’m getting hypervigilant. Like I’ll be tired during the day, but then nighttime comes and I’m wide awake. So when I got drowsy, that gave me hope. And so there were more things like that that happened along the way. Courtney: And then I remember nights where the thoughts weren’t as bad and I was like, okay, here’s my next step. So I, I saw little bits of progress along the way that kept me going. Martin: Yeah, you got like little hints that this was an approach that held some promise. You started to feel more sleepy as the night approached or as bedtime approached compared to more alert. Martin: And with those thoughts and those feelings, they were still showing up. But every now and then, perhaps they felt a little bit less powerful or a little bit less influential. Martin: We have to fight, we have to put effort into sleep. What medication can we explore? But you harnessed your experience. You drew on your superpower of self-reflection and your experience told you that that stuff doesn’t work. So. Your brain is suggesting that’s a route we should carry on pursuing. But you recognize it’s doing that ’cause it’s doing this job. Martin: It’s doing its job of looking out for you. But you knew from experience that that approach wasn’t getting you closer to where you wanted to be, so you wanted to stay committed to this approach of less resistance and building that skill and experiencing all this stuff with less of a struggle. Courtney: Exactly. Courtney: Yes. And I think when you mentioned the struggle, like my laying, laying in bed at night had become a place of struggle and just it felt like I was battling all night with my mind. And so I tried to make a point of not making my bed that place anymore. Courtney: So when I’m having those nights, I get outta bed and I come downstairs and I’ll journal or color or what have you, and try to do all that there, and then go back to bed when it’s calmer. Martin: So you withdrew from the battleground when you found yourself getting pulled into that fight. And this is another thing that some people can struggle with because they’re like, should I get out of bed? Martin: Should I stay in bed? And my answer is always, well, it’s really up to you. It doesn’t matter if you stay in bed or get out of bed. What matters is, are you engaged in a battle? And if you are, how might you withdraw from that battle? So you might want to color or read or watch TV in the living room, or you might want to do that in bed. Martin: It really doesn’t matter. What matters is you’re awake and you’re not fighting. You’re doing something other than battling away, struggling more, making things more difficult. Courtney: Yes. And that, you know, there’s that. I’ve read that somewhere. There’s a rule, you know, you don’t use your bed for anything but sleep because you don’t wanna create an association. Courtney: Well, on good nights, I can color in my bed, I can watch a show. I can read and I, there’s nights I can’t even get through a paragraph and I set it down, I’m out so I can, I can do activities in my bed and not associate it with anything. Courtney: But the night that, like you said, it is a struggle, I gotta get out of bed. I gotta go do that somewhere else. Because that is part of, I, how I think that that habit became created with insomnia is I would lay down at night in instant panic because my body was like, well this is, this is associated with the panic place. Courtney: You know what I mean? So that was a learning curve too. Martin: Yeah, absolutely. It, listening to you share that experience, really, you kind of just played around with some of this, this stuff, right? You gave it a try with an open and a curious mind. And with this understanding. You’re thinking, I’m just gonna see what I take from this. Martin: What am I gonna learn from this? Because we’re always gonna learn something from what we do. And so you’ve really learned what was a helpful way forward for you, and that kind of gave you that motivation or that impetus to keep you moving in that direction. So to, to bring this together, what you, what you’ve shared as the most helpful things was the educational component. Martin: You know, really understanding where insomnia comes from, what keeps it alive. And in short, it’s really all of our attempts to get rid of it. Ironically what keeps it alive. And you also learned how easy it is to get drawn into the struggle. And so when you are struggling, it’s not because you’re broken. Martin: It’s just because what you are understandably doing is you’re just kind of pumping insomnia full of oxygen in effect. You know, it is just kind of feeding the beast through no fault of your own. You found it really helpful to go to bed when you were sleepy, like finding it hard to stay awake rather than going to bed based on what time it was at night. Martin: And that led to less time awake or less time awake for potential struggle. You found it helpful to be aware or to cultivate an awareness of when you were struggling at night, when you were getting pulled into that battleground and with that awareness, you then chose to respond in a different way. So instead of putting effort into sleep fighting or avoiding thoughts and feelings, you’d do some coloring or you’d do some reading and you found it helpful most of the time to get outta bed to do that. Martin: And you found it helpful to practice opening up to whatever thoughts, whatever feelings are showing up, even though you might not want them to show up, there they are. You’re acknowledging them and you’re just allowing them to come and go to flow, to be an observer of them. And one way you did that, that you shared was you would just journal them, you would write them down, not as a way to kind of reason with them or change them, unless I’m wrong, in which case please correct me. Martin: But just as a way to acknowledge them. And it was almost a way that you were putting into practice this idea of opening up to the thoughts and feelings, just writing them down. Courtney: Yes. Yep. And I will say, yeah, it was both like there were nights I would journal just to get the thoughts outta my head. ’cause then they’re not spiraling while I’m laying there. Courtney: And there were nights that I would have old fears come back, like the old thoughts that I would write them down and then challenge them. Like for example. I feel like if I don’t sleep, I won’t be able to function tomorrow. And then I would be like, well, actually that’s not true because you have had many good days on, two hours, no hours of sleep. Courtney: And so for example, like a month ago, I had the first all night, or I’ll call it, you know, I was all night. I haven’t had one of those nights in years, but my husband and I were leaving for the airport that morning, I think at three 30. And so I was wired from packing and tra we were getting ready to travel. Courtney: I knew I, we had our flight we had to catch. So I gave myself a lot of compassion, like, this makes sense for you. Like, you know, this is, you’re about to travel. It’s the first time we left our boys at home. So there was a lot there. Like it made sense why my body would react that way. And yeah, you know, I, I think maybe I napped on the plane. Courtney: I don’t remember, but I tried not to pay too much attention to it and. Again, it was the first all nighter in years that I’ve had where I didn’t sleep all night long, but it was okay. Like I, we got there, we had our full day. I think I, we came back and I did take like an hour and a half nap or something, and then we went on with our evening and that night my body made up the sleep. Courtney: So I can have really good days, like if you’re struggling with insomnia, you can have normal days, you can function fine even if you don’t get sleep. So back to the thoughts, there was a lot of thoughts that I was able to challenge with the educational component that I found through your videos, which was very helpful. Martin: Yeah, I’m, I’m glad you mentioned that there are still times when sleep isn’t perfect or exactly as you want it to happen, because when we’re struggling, we might have that as our goal. You know, we just have a great night of sleep every single night. But the truth is that no human being has a great night of sleep every single night. Martin: The difference now is when sleep doesn’t go as you might want it to. It’s not this huge focus of your attention. It’s not something that creates a huge, difficult struggle and pulls you away from the life you want to live. Now it’s more like water off of a duck’s back. You know, it comes and it goes, and then you are moving on from it. Martin: It really has just lost all of its power and influence over you. And I do want to emphasize, you used the phrase self-compassion. And I think that’s huge because when we are struggling, we can be so hard on ourselves and mean to ourselves, and that doesn’t make things any easier. So giving ourselves some grace, some kindness can be immensely powerful. Martin: You discovered that thoughts are thoughts. They’re not more than thoughts. They’re not less than thoughts. They’re thoughts. So they’re not facts. Sometimes they might be true, but sometimes not. They’re not a reflection on who you are as a person. Martin: They’re not always an accurate prediction for the future. They’re not always an accurate reflection of the past. They’re thoughts. And so by listening to your thoughts being more open to them, it kind of came with that bonus that you were able to recognize, Hey, some of these thoughts aren’t even true. Martin: This thought is telling me that tomorrow is gonna be a disaster, but hang on a minute. The other day I had no sleep and I had a great day, or I had a good day, or an okay day. So you notice that with that acceptance, there’s a reminder that thoughts are nothing more or nothing less than thoughts, and you’ve got that separation too between your thoughts and your body. Martin: One thing you shared with us a little bit earlier was that as you practiced opening up, especially at first when it feels really scary, like what’s gonna happen if I start allowing these thoughts and these feelings to come in? It feels really uncomfortable. It can feel more and more intense. Then something happens, it kind of reaches a peak at some point, and then it kind of flows back down again. Martin: And you realize that even though it can feel really scary, really threatening your body is lying in the bed or on the couch in a safe place. So even though it feels very unsafe physically, you are safe. So with that openness and acknowledgement, you also got that reminder or that awareness that your thoughts are separate from your body. Martin: There was that detachment there, and that in turn can reduce some of their power and influence too. Courtney: Yes, and that’s something like I think with anxiety in general or insomnia, is like for someone like me who is, like I said, a recovering perfectionist type, the type A. You can have the bar set really high to where your idea of progress or success is. Courtney: I will never have a rough night again. I will not struggle with, you know, scary thoughts. My thoughts will balance out. I will be peaceful all the time, and that’s just not realistic, nor is that life and so much of our anxiety or other emotions or our body just responding to life. And so life is not perfect and that would be my encouragement to anyone struggling with it is maybe lower the bar a little bit. Courtney: I had to lower it many times to where, like I mentioned earlier, my idea of progress was just when my eyes got drowsy, like nowhere near a full night of sleep. But I was just happy with that. And so you can build on that versus trying to get your thoughts to be what you want them to be. Get your body to do what you want it to do all the time. Courtney: Because then what if that’s your standard? What happens when you do have a rough night, a couple, you know, down the road or a couple months, a couple years, for example? How are you gonna respond to that? So I even had that challenge last night. I had, you know, some troubling thoughts pop into my head and at first I was like, oh geez. Courtney: And I was really kind of dwelling on ’em, and I’m like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Just because I’m thinking it doesn’t mean it’s true, you know, separate a little bit. So it’s still a practice. But that I think is a huge part of insomnia is the thoughts that, that come in during those late nights when you’re, you feel like you are the only one awake in the world or in your neighborhood or wherever, and it’s dark and you are alone with the loud, intense thoughts and you just feel like you’re, you’re crazy. Courtney: You’re nuts because you can’t move past it. And really, like you said, you’re not broken. It’s just the dynamic of the situation. But you can separate and you can challenge them or write them down and. It will peak and it will, it will pass At some point. It will pass. Courtney: In the beginning, and I’m sure anyone who has struggled with this, can attest to this, that the beginning of anxiety is such a lonely place. And you feel so alone, like I mentioned, but then you start to hear from other people, especially on your channel. And it, it’s mind boggling to me how. Courtney: Insomnia starts and progresses is almost like a formula. Like we’re not alone because it almost plays out identically person to person, regardless of their job, where they live, if they’re a parent or not, if they’re married or not, if they’re male, female. It’s amazing to me how similar everyone’s experiences. Courtney: So you’re, it’s not, it’s not you, it’s the insomnia, if that makes sense. Or the response to it. Martin: One thing that you touched upon was how we’re measuring progress as we’re on this journey away from the struggle. Martin: Because for as long as we are measuring progress on sleep or what thoughts and feelings are showing up, we might be setting the stage for more struggle because our own experience probably tells us that we can’t directly control those things. So if we’re measuring how well we’re doing against something we can’t control there’s just so much potential to still be in that quicksand and not be free from the struggle. Martin: Looking for action based markers of progress can be more helpful. Like, am I doing more of the stuff that matters? Are the decisions I’m making more related to what I want to be doing or how I want to be protecting sleep or preparing for sleep? There’s so many potential markers of progress out there, but focusing on action based markers of progress can be really helpful because it keeps us focused on what is in our control. Martin: Which are our actions. Courtney: Yes. I remember like in the thick of it, there were days where I had said that, you know, the sleep consumed my thoughts. And I, I was walking around like a zombie in this in the sense of, all I thought about was I didn’t sleep last night. I probably won’t sleep tonight. And just like feeling so jealous of all my friends and family, like they’re sleeping with no problem. Courtney: Like, this is not my life right now. This is horrible. And now I, there’ll be nights I don’t sleep well and it’s like, oh yeah, I forgot I didn’t sleep that great last night. Okay. You know? It’s not always like that, but more often it is. And like I can look at my day and be like, oh, I had a great day. I laughed a lot. Courtney: I had a lot of joy. The weather was beautiful. I exercised, you know, I had a great day despite what my night looked like. Martin: There’s just so much in your life beyond sleep. Sleep is still a part of your life, but it’s not the main part or a huge part of your life anymore. It’s just one thing of many things. Martin: How long would you say it took for you to practice this new approach of less resistance, less effort, not trying to control sleep, thoughts, feelings, to get you to a place where you felt that you left the struggle behind, that you can now live your life independently of sleep, and even in the presence of whatever thoughts and feelings might choose to show up? Courtney: So let me see. For me, I think my full. Severe anxiety struggle was about two and a half to three years. So I had that, you know, under my belt before implementing these, these strategies. I wanna say it probably took me about six months, give or take to, to where I, I didn’t feel burdened by it anymore. Courtney: Now I will say the nights or the episodes I would have where I would have a couple nights in a row, I would start to get a little weary again and a little doubtful and a little nervous, but I would get through those. So despite those, or setting those to the side, I would say about six months. Martin: I’m really glad that you emphasized that there was still ups and downs along the way. It doesn’t mean that over the course of that six months, every day or every night was incrementally better than the previous ones. There were sometimes when things felt really good and other times where it felt like, oh, I’m getting pulled back into the struggle again. Martin: But what mattered was you just kept on with that practice. You acknowledged what was happening. Maybe you were being a bit kinder to yourself when you noticed that maybe you were getting pulled back into the struggle again and just refocusing your attention on acting in a way that you wanted to act in response, acting in a way that you knew was gonna be moving you closer or in the direction that you wanted to be heading. Courtney: Yes, yes. I remember in the thick of it too, like wondering how long it was gonna take me to feel better. And I remember hearing someone say, oh, it takes as long as it takes. And I was so frustrated by that. ’cause I’m like, I just want a number. Like, is this gonna be like a year? Is it like six months? Like what am I? Courtney: But it does, I mean, everybody’s different. Your body handles it differently. Like mine remembers very vividly what happened. So I, that I wouldn’t say presents a challenge, but like I said, I have to be more mindful than someone else might. So everybody’s different. But yeah, it’s just keeping in mind where you want to go and keep. Courtney: Keep going through what you’ve learned and holding close to the va, what you value about your life, and allowing the space and the compassion for the upsets or, you know, setbacks or whatever you would like to call those. Martin: How were you able to be patient with yourself when no doubt you wanted progress to happen like immediately, which is human nature. How did you practice being patient and just staying committed to the practice? Courtney: Yes, that was very challenging. Even with anxiety in general, I still struggle with being patient with myself initially because I do, like I said, I have unfortunately high standards for myself that I always have to lower. And so the nights of, you know, bad sleep or a really anxious day, I just constantly had to be like, okay, you know, I can’t, I can’t control this. Courtney: I just have to accept it. I will get through this. Like this will pass. Just constantly refocusing. But yeah, it was very hard because there’s so many days, even now with different things, I’m like, man, I’m still struggling with this aspect of something, or I haven’t moved past this yet. And again, that’s the initial response. Courtney: But then I have to, you know, kind of be mindful of that and respond with, I’m growing. Life is not perfect. Progress is not linear. And that kind of helps with the patience part. But it is very challenging, I will say that. Martin: So it sounds like when you felt impatient you reminded yourself that you are on a journey. Martin: You are learning that you are growing that you’re heading in the direction you want to be heading. And on any journey there’s gonna be ups and downs. What matters is just continuing on the journey if it feels like that journey matters. Courtney: Yes. One thing that like was frustrating for me is like, I would hear different success stories and of anything, like, you hear success stories or you read about ’em, and people don’t always share that they’re still working through things. Courtney: Sometimes it’s just like, oh, I struggle with this thing now I’m here on the other side of it, and life is great. So when you are like me and you’re still working through different things, it’s hard not to see that as a sign of failure and understand that that is the normal, it’s normal to ebb and flow and you know, like you said, sleep is not perfect. Courtney: It can’t be controlled, so you can’t gauge your progress off of that. Martin: Yeah, that’s a good reminder that we are never gonna reach this perfect end point moment in our life where everything is perfect for the rest of time. When we’re struggling, we often feel like, if only I can get rid of this one obstacle, then everything will be perfect. Martin: But the reality is once one obstacle goes away at least one more is gonna show up because life is a journey and that journey involves many obstacles. Courtney, I’m curious what would you say an average night is like for you these days? Courtney: Oh, I would say most nights I probably, I don’t know, I wander upstairs around like 9 30, 9 45, you know, and then I’ll get in bed and my husband will, I have chat real quick, and then he passes out within 30 seconds, which is amazing. Courtney: But I will grab my Kindle, read. It depends how tired I am. Read maybe a paragraph, maybe a page, and I’m out. Around 10 o’clock, 10 30, and I get up about six or six 30. And yeah, sleep. Sleep pretty good. I would say. Martin: I think what really stands out for me there is that there’s no kind of mention of, well, I come home I, I turn all the lights down in my house, I make sure the thermostat is set to a certain temperature. Martin: I put on some blue blocking glasses. I drink some warm milk. You know, there’s, there’s just nothing there. It was just, I wander up to bed I talk to my husband for a bit, I read and then I get outta bed in the morning. There was just like nothing else. There’s none of that effort. None of that trying, none of the, the rules, none of the rituals. Courtney: Yeah. And I’ll say, you know, there are a couple, you know, nights here and there where like recently I was anxious in general about different things, and I was like. Struggling with some night sweats and just feeling on edge and maybe some vivid dreams. And so I got up and came downstairs and just got some water and sat for a minute and went back up to bed. Courtney: And those are the nights that, like I said, I just had to be more mindful that, you know, maybe through my anxiety, my body’s trying to tell me to slow down or pay attention to something. But it’s not an indication now of like, oh, something, you’re gonna go back there. You’re doing something wrong. It’s because I know most nights are like what I just told you prior to that. Martin: You’ve got a normal human brain that’s gonna generate anxiety and all different thoughts and feelings from time to time. Now they’re just not pulling you into so much of a struggle. You’ve got that skill in your back pocket now to kind of acknowledge them to make space for them. Martin: To be kind to yourself and to not feel as though you have to do anything with them because they are thoughts and they are feelings. And ultimately you get to choose how to respond to them. Courtney: Yeah. And that’s something that is super beneficial about this insomnia journey is not only have I learned to how to relate to my thoughts at nighttime, but during the day, ’cause there’s, you know, during the day I’ll just be going through my day like anybody else would. Courtney: And I’m sure anyone can relate when you get a crazy thought that pops into your head and you know, before it could really jar me and it could cause anxiety or something like that. But now I’m just like, oh, okay, that’s just a thought. Like, doesn’t mean it’s true. So the benefit I think of this insomnia journey is it can benefit all areas of your life. Courtney: You learn some skills that can apply to everything. Martin: As you become less of an opponent to certain thoughts and feelings, they become less distracting. So they can show up during the day. You are able to just quickly acknowledge them and refocus on where you are, what you’re doing, what you want to be doing, rather than, you know, the magnifying glass comes out and you’ve got some, a pair of tweezers and you’re kind of looking through that thought and it’s just the whole focus of your attention. Martin: And you miss out on the whole world around you. You’re missing out on where you are and what you’re doing. Courtney: Yes. Yep. Exactly. Same as like the insomnia monster, if you will. The more attention you give to it, the more it grows. And same with those thoughts that pop into your head. The more attention you give to them, the more they can get, they can really grab a hold of you and then you’re dwelling on them. Courtney: I just remembered, I never shared how I was able to get off the sleep medication because that can be a huge source of shame and like struggle is the sleep medications themselves. So coming from someone who was on three and I, and that was just at one time, like there was a lot of adjustments, made a lot of changes. Courtney: What did it for me was tolerating those uncomfortable thoughts because I told myself, okay. As I try to decrease my dosage and wean off of this, this is gonna create some really uncomfortable feelings and thoughts and I, it’s okay. This is expected. So it did. And as I expected that to happen, I was kind of prepared for it and I was able to sit with that and over time it got a lot better and I was able to challenge the thoughts that like would say, well you still need sleep medication. Courtney: And I would be like, well no. ’cause I took half a dose last night and I slept really good. So that was huge for me, was able to get off of those through challenging and tolerating the thoughts. And thankfully I haven’t had, I haven’t had to take a sleep aid in, gosh, three or four years I think. So it’s possible if you feel completely like gripped by sleep medication, it is completely possible to get off of it and sleep well. Martin: I’m really glad you touched upon that because we talked about so much good stuff. I feel that that kind of got a little bit lost because you were telling us right at the start that you just felt trapped in this life of medication dependency almost. It felt like you had to take this medication even though you knew it really wasn’t giving you the kind of results you wanted, but you felt like you had no alternative to it. Martin: So was it a case that you got some practice in first with this approach of lowering that resistance to being awake at night, lowering the resistance to the thoughts and the feelings, and then as you started to feel as though you were building that skill, then you started to tackle them moving away from the medication. Martin: Like what, what was the start of that journey like for you of moving away from the medication? Courtney: I had enough self-awareness then to know, okay, I need to get some of these practices under my belt and be, you know, comfortable with them before I try to make a big change like that. Because as I mentioned, there were nights I would try to think about, okay, maybe I could not take that medicine tonight, or maybe I could decrease the dose and instantly I would be like panicking. Courtney: And I was like, okay, okay, so let’s tackle this first. And then once I realized like those strategies were working and I, the one night I was feeling drowsy before I even took my medicine, that was an indication, okay, I don’t need the sleep medication to induce drowsiness. So that was the first step and then I was able to build on that later on. Courtney: And then I think what also really helped was one of your videos talking about how or I had read, maybe you shared it, there was a study that talks about how sleep medications what on average give you 40 extra minutes of sleep or something like that. I had read, it wasn’t even anything significant and I’m like, why am I taking this medicine if I’m trying, if on average it helps you gain an extra, you know, however many minutes of sleep and I’m awake all night anyway. Courtney: So it was just a logical, like, this is not actually helping me. So it was that combined with the, the step taking the building on each step that I took. Martin: Was it a long process for you of moving away from the medication or did it happen quite quickly? Courtney: It was a very gentle, slow, prog, slow process for me, and I knew it would have to be just because of how, like I, how I handled change in general. Courtney: But especially with that, I was like, Ugh, I’m just gonna give myself a lot of grace and a lot of time and yeah. Yeah, I was able to get off of it, but for me it took a while. Martin: Did you have that temptation as you were moving away from the medication, reducing your dose, that you’re starting to feel more confident and, yeah, I don’t need this medication to make sleep happen and then may be a really difficult night shows up and then your problem solving brain fires up and it’s like, well, we need to go back to the medication. Martin: Was, was that something you experienced and if it was, how did you respond? Courtney: Yes, those old thoughts would creep back in and I would be like, oh, you know, ready to go back to that. And I had to challenge that. Like, no, this didn’t help you before. You will get through this. You don’t need them, you don’t actually need them to sleep. Courtney: So those were the thoughts that I would have to challenge. I couldn’t just, you know, write ’em down like I would actually have to challenge them. But yeah, much like my body remembers what happened, the old thoughts are very much there to, so I would have to. Re just be, make, be mindful of that, that it’s gonna be, it’s gonna take a while. Courtney: My body remembers that, and therefore those thoughts might come back again. Martin: You reminded yourself of that conflict that can happen between our problem solving brain and our experience, maybe like the wise mind perhaps. So your problem solving brain was like, no, we need to go back to the medication. Martin: And it’s so easy to listen to that problem solving brain because it serves us really well in so many areas of life. But not all the time. And you drew on your experience and you reminded yourself that, you know, I’ve got this bank of evidence here that tells me that I don’t need medication to make sleep happen. Martin: That sleep can happen without it. With less of it, I can feel drowsy. So there’s what my problem solving brain is saying isn’t always true in effect. And it was helpful for you to remind yourself of that. What does it feel like now that you’ve eliminated that medication from your life and that you are sleeping and living your life independently of that? Courtney: Oh man. It, it’s just so freeing to be out of, out of that place. I didn’t ever think I was gonna get out of, I thought once I’m dependent on medication, like I, I don’t even know how I would be able to get out of this, this place, but I did. And also, like, it just, it’s so much more trust for my body. Like my body knows what to do and I can just, I can trust it to do that. Courtney: So that has been cool that I don’t need to intervene. So again, a lot of freedom. Martin: Courtney, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening to this and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that maybe they are the one person that’s truly broken, they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia. Martin: What would you say to them? Courtney: Like if they’re already watching this, they’re already on your channel. Like just try to stick to these videos and drown out anything else, because that can be very confusing and you can easily fall back into, well, maybe I need to try that supplement, or maybe my sleep problems related to that. Courtney: Like just keep it focused on the educational content here, as well as the success stories that you’ve shared on here. Because like we said, you know, it’s a common theme through everyone that has struggled with insomnia and we all have come to the same place maybe a little bit differently, but we’re essentially on the other side of that big battle that we had. Courtney: So that should give people hopefully a lot of hope that. There’s, this is where the space is to heal from insomnia. So try to drown out other advice or articles or videos. You know, it can get very confusing and it can make you feel a lot worse. You are not alone by any means, and as many people have been where you’re at, I have as well, and I, I thought I was the exception. Courtney: I didn’t ever think that I would be where I’m at today with how much medication I was on, how many doctor’s appointments I had to go to, how much sleep I had lost. I, I was in such a dark pit that I didn’t think I would ever get out. And if you’re willing to give yourself time and have self-compassion, you will get out. Courtney: And, and don’t feel bad if you know you’re someone like me where you, you, your, you know, your prayer life isn’t working or you feel like it’s not working, or all the supplements you’re taking are not working. It’s not you. And. It’s okay to be there. Like it’s okay to not be okay, but you do have a lot of hope in this entire channel here that you’ve provided and the videos, the testimonies is proof that there’s hope and you can be one of the people talking about your story. Courtney: So hanging there, it’s, it’s awful. It’s really, really hard. Like, I, I don’t want to glaze over that. I wouldn’t wish insomnia on anybody. It is a very, very dark and scary place. But you, there is so much hope. Martin: Thanks again for the time you’ve taken out for your day to come onto the podcast and to share your experience, your insights, your journey, your transformation. Martin: I just know is gonna help a lot of people. Courtney, so thank you. Courtney: Thank you for having me. Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to get your life back from insomnia, I would love to help. You can learn more about the sleep coaching programs I offer at Insomnia Coach — and, if you have any questions, you can email me. Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Please share this episode!

Amber had always been someone people counted on. A nurse. A mom. For most of her life, sleep wasn’t something she worried about. It just happened. Then life changed. After her second baby — who arrived early and had some health problems — nights became more difficult. She’d lie down only to wait for the next cry. It felt easier to stay awake than to sleep. Years working as a NICU nurse added another layer. More responsibility. More pressure to perform. Sleep felt increasingly fragile and one night she couldn’t sleep at all. Panic showed up. Heart racing. Mind spinning. Insomnia became something to fix. She researched. Tightened her routine. Optimized sleep hygiene. Tried teas. Tried prescriptions. Got in and out of bed. Tried relaxing harder. Tried doing everything “right.” Nothing worked. In fact, the harder she tried, the more she struggled. Nights became lonely and exhausting. Life started to revolve around sleep. Then, in the middle of the night, searching for help, she stumbled across stories of people who weren’t fixing sleep — they were changing how they responded to being awake. Less fighting. More flexibility. More focus on living. It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t perfect. But little by little, Amber’s struggle loosened. And sleep stopped being the boss. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin: Okay. So Amber, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast. Amber: Thank you. Martin: Let’s start right at the very beginning, as always. Can you tell us when your issues with sleep first began and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep? Amber: Yeah. For the most part I’ve been a pretty good sleeper. Amber: However, I’ve had some points in my life where it’s become a little bit hard and I would say the first time that I noticed a significant change was that was after I had my second baby, he was early, he had some health problems. And I noticed, that I started losing my sleep then. Obviously every new mother does anyways, but I was worried about feeding him. Amber: I was worried about him getting enough to eat. I would get him settled and then I would lay down and just be waiting for that next cry. And so it was like almost easier to stay awake in a way, but not in the long run. So that was the first time I noticed it. And then the bulk of my career I have been a NICU nurse, which also made me a little anxious about my newborns. Amber: Sometimes I would be a little bit anxious before certain shifts. Not always, ’cause I worked for 25 years and it was great. But occasionally I would be anxious about getting to bed and in time and getting enough sleep. And so I noticed it there. And then I went back to school a few years ago to become a nurse practitioner and I probably had a little bit of a harder time sleeping during school. Amber: I got a lot more sensitive to my husband’s snoring during that time and, very light sleeper. And then after that, when I got my first job as a nurse practitioner, I was very on edge and very anxious. And while I was orienting for that job, I did not get a lot of sleep. I still at that time wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the sleep itself. Amber: Just aware that I wasn’t sleeping enough. Then I would say a couple years ago is where it really came to a head. I had various just normal life stresses going on with various kids and things. And one night I just could not sleep. And I started to recognize that I was having a bit of panic attack and I had some experience with panic and anxiety in the past, like mainly around that baby that I told you about. Amber: I had learned to work through that and I really hadn’t experienced a lot of it for probably a good decade and a half, but I noticed it that night and that generated a real fear response to me. And I thought, I remember distinctly having thought, oh my gosh, is this gonna keep me from sleeping now? And that’s, that was the hallmark. Amber: That’s what started it. And it became its own beast from that point on. Martin: You can recall a lot of times in your life when there were some stressors going on, for want of a better word, and that impacted your sleep. But it tended to be the case that once those initial triggers were no longer present or as relevant, things tended to get back on track. Amber: I had experienced times in the past where my anxiety was higher and I have always known that my personality goes a little in that direction, but it was manageable. I had been able to manage it and I had learned to manage it pretty well previous to that. Amber: But this time it I think the fear that it was going to affect my sleep, I did not know how to deal with that, and that scared me on a whole new level. And so now I feel like I was dealing with two things, just, being an anxious sort and now not being able to sleep on top of that. Amber: I value my health and I work in healthcare and so I do pay attention to details for sure. Amber: And getting enough sleep was very important to me. I know all the health benefits of that I’ve, and so the thought of not being able to have that and trying to function without it was quite terrifying to me, especially thinking of taking care of other people’s health. Martin: So you’ve got that added pressure to perform sleep because it’s not just about you, it’s also about all the other people you’re interacting with and caring for each day. What were you doing to try and get things back on track? Amber: I just go right to trying to problem solve. And of course that’s an important part of my job. That’s how I’ve dealt with being a mother and any other role I’ve had is to figure out, okay, what do I need to do differently? Amber: I need to understand this better. I’m gonna research it. I’m going to read about it. I’m gonna see what other people do and I’m gonna try all those things just, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna fix this. That’s what I thought. I’m gonna fix it. And so I did several different things. A lot of things that I’ve heard described on your other episodes. Amber: Sleep hygiene was a big thing, and that is actually something I talked to patients about. And so I thought I need to make my sleep hygiene better and I need to make sure I get in bed at a certain time and have everyone be quiet. I can’t have my noise in my room. I need to be really relaxed, so I’ve got to force myself to be relaxed. Amber: Try some of the sleep herbal teas. I don’t love medication, so I was trying not to go there in the beginning. Eventually I did go and try some medication. I have plenty of nurse practitioner friends that could write me a prescription for something. And so I tried various things, but only briefly I will say I, because I quickly realized that there was no medication that was helping. Amber: It might help initially. And then very quickly I discovered that my alarm system was stronger than the medication. And I think I tried maybe two or three different things and I just thought, I’m not gonna do this anymore. ’cause I don’t really wanna be on it anyways and it’s not helping. So yeah, I tried all those things. Amber: It was a difficult time. Amber: There was one night where I tried Ambien. I had tried hydroxyzine, I had tried Trazodone. Those two didn’t help at all. Amber: And one night I tried Ambien and I knew as a professional that’s not a medication that you want to take for very long ’cause it can really be disrupted to sleep. But by that point I was so desperate that I thought maybe if I took it a couple nights, it would help reset me. And that was even the term that the provider I talked to and I had was that maybe I needed a couple nights of reset. Amber: And I, so the first night I tried it and I was really relieved knowing that I had it that night. So I think my anxiety went down quite a bit right there. ’cause I knew I had something that was going to help and I just slept like a log that night. And so I thought, great this is it. I’m gonna do this a couple nights, I’m gonna get rid of it and I’m gonna move on and be normal again. Amber: And the very next night I took it and I slept really hard for maybe two hours and then I was up the rest of the night and I was pretty blown away that I had overpowered that medication that I knew to be pretty strong. And so from, I just threw it out at that point because I thought this isn’t working and it’s not gonna, it’s gonna, give me side effects anyway, so I don’t want it. Amber: So yeah I was really to the end of my rope at that point. I didn’t know what else to do. Martin: I think a lot of people will identify with at least some kind of aspect of your experience with the medication there. You’ve got that thing and it can feel like a sense of relief. Martin: It’s almost like you’re delegating all of the effort that you might felt you had to put into sleep to try and make it happen, now it’s not your issue anymore, it’s down to whatever this thing is. So you take it and it’s that’s it. Now there’s no more effort. There’s no more trying, there’s no more pressure, there’s no more performance anxiety, and that in itself can just immediately create better conditions for sleep. Martin: Maybe the real issue is all the understandable trying and the pressure and the effort. Amber: Yeah that’s very true. And as you were talking, I actually was thinking of something else I tried. I had an another provider tell me to at night it was a CBT thing. It was to get out of bed when I started feeling those anxious feelings so that I wouldn’t associate my bed with that anxiety. Amber: And I thought that makes sense ’cause I’m really struggling when I’m laying in my bed. And she told me also to pull out the Old Testament and read Leviticus ’cause it’s really boring. And maybe that would help. And I did it and it was boring. But I found after a while it, it helped a bit initially, but I found after a while that the exercise of getting in and out of bed when I was feeling anxiety was adding to my anxiety. Amber: ’cause I was just like, oh, here I go again. I’ve, been in bed for 15 minutes. I gotta get out again. It was just something else I had to keep track of. Martin: Did it almost feel like an additional punishment on top of being awake, this kind of obligation that I should be getting out of bed as well? Amber: Yes, it did. Very much yeah, it was not relaxing to me. Martin: I’ve had guests on the podcast that have found it really helpful to get out of bed during the night, and I have other guests just like yourself that did not find it helpful to get out of bed during the night. Martin: And I think really it just comes down to what our intent is. If we are getting out of bed because we are trying to get rid of anxiety or thoughts or feelings or to get rid of insomnia, to make ourselves feel sleepy again, to make sleep happen, then we might be setting ourselves up for some struggle if our experience tells us that’s out of our control if we’re getting out of bed, just because to us, that feels like a more productive way of spending our time awake during the night. Martin: Maybe that is gonna be helpful for you. And if your goal is to just use that time awake in a way that’s more useful, that involves less struggling, we can then see that it doesn’t matter, does it? You can do that in bed. You can do that out of bed. Because our goal is just to experience this with less struggle. Martin: It’s the struggle that kind of adds all that extra difficulty on top. Amber: That is very true. And that is what I had to come to. It took me a while. And I know I actually emailed you a few times about, I wanted you to tell me exactly what to do and of course you won’t do that. Amber: Your answers are to help people search themselves to find out what they need to do because it is very individual. And I finally came to. I just need to see how I feel in the moment. If it feels better, if I want to stay in bed, then I’m gonna do that. But if the feelings of, I don’t know, anxiety or restlessness, get too much for me and I would rather do something out of my bed, then I’ll do that. Amber: So I really ended up not having a certain way of doing things, which I think was a key. Martin: You were giving yourself more flexibility. Whereas when we were in problem solving mode, it’s I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this. And they’ve got this long list, haven’t we? Amber: Yeah, the algorithm. Martin: Exactly. Yeah. But then when we start to ease up a little bit, don’t cling onto it quite so tightly, we can become a little bit more flexible. And that in itself can be quite freeing, right? Because Amber: it is Martin: now we realize we’ve got options again, and that just opens things up a little bit. Martin: That doesn’t mean that things are just immediately gonna change, but it can just relieve some of that weight from our shoulders and help us realize that we can choose what we want to do. Amber: It’s quite liberating actually, when you get to that point. Martin: Just to rewind a little bit, what was an average night like for you back then, if there was such a thing? Amber: In the beginning, just sheer difficulty. It was miserable. It was absolutely miserable. I felt very isolated and very alone because of course everyone else in my house is completely out sleeping beautifully. And I am not. Amber: And it seemed to me like everybody in the neighborhood was sleeping great too. And I am up pacing and walking the hallways or trying to, focus on something that I can’t focus on. Having a lot of an anxious feelings. It just was awful. And then dreading the next day when I was going to be exhausted and very certain I wasn’t going to be able to perform in any of my roles the way I wanted to. Amber: That was the beginning. As time went on, that very slowly improved, but I did still have a lot of difficult nights as I moved forward. Martin: How was this influencing your days when you were still tangled up in the struggle? Amber: Yeah, that was really hard. I called in sick the next day at work and I hardly ever call in sick. I think I’ve missed, gosh, two days and two and a half years. I really, but I didn’t think I could be capable of my job the next day, and I was terrified of myself and terrified of how I would let down other people. Amber: And so I stayed home and just continued to suffer at home. And then, I mentioned my job a lot. That’s a really important role to me. But of my most important role is that of mother. And as family member to my family. And I also felt like I was not able to do a good job there. I felt like I was not quite present. Amber: They could tell that I just wasn’t as happy or didn’t have the energy. I wasn’t doing things that I enjoyed as much. It was just really became enclosed in myself and an obsessed about how I could fix this problem, not a good way to live. Martin: It makes sense why you called in sick to work not only for yourself, for your own wellbeing. It felt what if I might make a mistake at work because I can’t really focus. I’m so distracted. So it’s completely understandable why you would do that. And then at the same time, when you call in sick, you’re not doing that career or that job that might feel important to you. Martin: That’s reflection of who you are. It’s all this stuff influences your actions in a way that you get pulled away from that life you want to live. And that could be your work, your home life, your family life, your identity. It just feels like your actions start to serve insomnia, sleep, all these thoughts and feelings rather than your actions serving you, who you are and the life you want to live. Martin: And that just makes it all so much more difficult. Amber: Yeah, that’s so true. It’s like insomnia became the boss. Amber: I wasn’t new to the sensation of anxiety or panic. I had episodes of that in the past and I was feeling pretty confident that I knew how to handle that. ’cause it had been so long and I had moved through some really difficult things in my life. Amber: And I did okay. So then this thing came along and it was mysterious because I’d had this confidence so I could handle anxiety and difficult things. But this was a whole new thing and it caused me to go right down to the bottom again and go, what is wrong with me? What is wrong with my brain? Amber: Why I felt like I wasn’t doing it to myself, but I couldn’t understand how or why I was doing it to myself. So yes, very mysterious and very difficult for me to understand in the beginning. Martin: When you came across my work, what made you think that there was something different or something new or opened up this possibility that there’s a new way forward here? Amber: As probably most people that encounter your work it was in the middle of the night while I was on, looking for help in the middle of the night because I was just desperate. And I stumbled upon some of your, maybe one of your YouTubes, I think, and you were interviewing somebody like this. Amber: I listened to the person’s story and I thought, oh my gosh, that sounds exactly like how I feel right now. They were really expressing how desperate they were in the beginning and how confusing all the feelings I was feeling at the time. And so that really grabbed my attention because I heard the same level of desperation in this person’s description of themself, and yet they were now being interviewed by you and having worked through that. Amber: And so it gave me hope. And as I listened to it more, I realized that it actually was very similar to how I had learned to manage anxious thoughts or anxiety in the past. And that was to let them happen. So it was a different level of learning how to let something happen. So that cognitive understanding started coming. Amber: The more I would listen to your things on YouTube and your podcasts, I had, I felt like it made sense. It resonated with me. Martin: This is why I’m just so grateful that people like yourself are willing to come on because it, it can be so powerful to hear these journeys and these stories. Martin: There’s that validation. There’s the acknowledgement that you’re not alone, and then there’s that hope, and you had the bonus of being familiar with an approach of opening up to insomnia, opening up to panic, fear, anxiety. Amber: It’s a paradoxical thing that, that is how you get through it is by actually allowing it to happen. Amber: So that, that was a pivotal moment for me and started my process of recovery, which certainly didn’t happen overnight. But the cognitive understanding was there. Martin: So in terms of allowing it to happen, in a practical sense, how do you allow insomnia, for example, to happen when you really don’t want it to happen. Martin: How do you allow anxiety to happen when you really don’t want it to happen? What does that look like in, in terms of practical action? Amber: Yeah. That that, that was the next big hurdle was trying to figure that out. I asked that question of myself and of you, I think several times again, and it’s not something that you can figure out overnight. Amber: It takes a lot of practice. I think ongoing practice, I don’t think that practice ever ends because there’s always a new layer of things. Amber: One of them was to not beat myself up for things, because I realized that when I would get really frustrated and go, why can’t I do this? Why can’t I? What’s, why do I think this? Amber: Why is my brain so busy? Why do I think I have to problem solve everything? Why? I realized that I was just throwing fuel on the fire. I was just putting more pressure on myself. Friend said to me one morning, something that stuck with me, and you actually repeated in an email something very similar. Amber: She said I would never change your problem solving mind. It makes you who you are and look at all the things you’ve been able to do and accomplish. Because of the way your mind works and who would you be without your mind the way you were? And you had said something pretty similar to me about that too. Amber: So from that point on, I started looking at that differently and not flogging myself for just being who I am and seeing the benefit of the way my brain works. That was a big realization for me. And then another one was to realize when I was starting to try to prob over problem solve, maybe, oh, it worked this night but this didn’t work that night. Amber: Maybe I did it a little bit wrong. Maybe you know, I’m not following the algorithm. It was frustrating ’cause professionally, I really do have to follow algorithms a lot. And so I was having to pull away from that natural way of thinking. And not get stuck in this loop of problem solving and just letting it be, not worrying about it so much. Martin: Step one perhaps was, not beating yourself up over something that your own experience is telling you is out of your control. If you could have made a certain amount or type of sleep happen, you would’ve, you’d be doing it, right? If you could magically and permanently delete anxiety from your mind, you would’ve done it. Martin: But your experience tells you that’s not possible. You tried and tried. The conclusion from your experience was that’s not possible. So it sounds like part of your journey towards opening up a little bit more to this difficult stuff that you’d rather not experience is to acknowledge that it is out of your control and that your mind isn’t working against you, it’s not your adversary, even though it can sometimes feel that way. Martin: Because anxiety generally speaking doesn’t feel good. We can see it as a negative thing or a bad thing. If only this anxiety will go away, I would be able to sleep. If only this anxiety would go away, I would be able to be the person I want to be. Martin: But the brain generates anxiety because it’s trying to give us information about something. It’s trying to remind us of something that’s important. It’s trying to protect us. It’s trying to look out for us. It’s trying to keep us safe, and it’s gonna do this whether there’s a real threat or not, because it’s hyper cautious. Martin: It’s focused on doom and gloom. ’cause all the good, happy, fluffy, safe stuff isn’t a threat or a concern. So the brain spends no time on that. It’s only ever gonna focus on what might happen or the worst possible outcome or the worst possible experience. Martin: If we feel anxious that maybe we left the gas stove on. And so we turn around in our driveway and we go back in, we find out we did leave the gas stove on. Is anxiety still a bad thing when it stopped our house from exploding? It’s like what we add on top of it that is the source of so much of our struggle. Amber: Yes, very true. I think, I started using an analogy in my head as I was figuring this out more as a NICU nurse, which. Amber: All those years, if you’ve ever been in, in a neonatal intensive care, there’s a lot of alarms that go off all the time. And so sometimes the nurses get a sense of whether it’s an alarm that needs to be paid attention to or not. And people who haven’t been in there are really on edge because they can just, why are we not getting on top of all these alarms, but the nurses like this one, this is okay. Amber: We’re okay. We don’t need to do anything about it. And I started to realize that’s what was probably going on in me is I, I had an alarm that had some value to it and at times I needed to, of course I need to attend to it. I don’t wanna not be fearful of anything. But it also can go off for things that are not really urgent or really emergent. Amber: It might be a mistake, it might be like in the nicu, maybe the baby’s wiggling and setting off their alarm, and it’s not a problem. So realizing that a little more was helpful to me. Martin: I think that’s a fantastic analogy and I love how you connected it to a real ongoing experience that’s relevant to your life. Martin: ‘Cause that always makes this stuff so much more powerful. And yeah, there’s, these alarms are going off. Sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re less helpful, sometimes they’re not helpful, they’re not useful. Sometimes maybe they’re more of a distraction than anything else, but what are they? Martin: At the end of the day, they’re snippets of information and we get to decide how to respond. The alternative approach if you’re in that ward is to just be so focused on, I must not hear any alarms today. I can’t hear any alarms. That’s first of all, that’s just gonna take so much of your energy, focus and attention. Martin: How are you gonna be able to care for your patients and do the stuff that matters when your brain is, all of its capacity is on trying to avoid hearing an alarm. Amber: And as time went on, I think my alarm system got a little smarter. I wasn’t going off as much because it wasn’t bothering me as much. Amber: One other thing that’s come to me while we’ve been talking that I also realized I had a few different epiphanies while going through this, and I realized, I kept realizing different levels at which I was trying to force something to happen. Initially it was trying to force sleep. Amber: Then it was trying to force myself to relax and not have anxiety. And then when I started doing your program and going about it that way, then I was trying to force myself to be okay or maybe even being awake or be okay with the anxiety. And I wasn’t. And it took me a while to realize, oh, I don’t have to like this actually, I can acknowledge this is hard. Amber: It is not. This is not ideal. This is not what I wanna do. This is not how I wanna feel. And that’s okay. But I can make a choice here. I do have a choice in what I’m gonna do next. I can have a choice in my discernment. And that was probably one of the bigger epiphanies that I had. ’cause that one really carried out over into other parts of my life too. Martin: I’m glad you made that point because when we hear about this idea of reducing our resistance to something that we don’t really want to experience or to accept it, this whole philosophy of acceptance, a common reservation I guess that people have is but I’m not okay with this. How do I make myself be okay with something that I’m not okay with? Martin: I want to be asleep. I don’t want to be awake. And that’s where we can get tripped up. Because it’s not about pretending that you are okay with it. It’s not about pretending that you enjoy being awake pretending that fatigue doesn’t exist, pretending that anxiety doesn’t make things more difficult, that you enjoy it, that it’s great to experience. Martin: It’s about accepting that this stuff is gonna show up and it’s trying to fight it or avoid it just makes things more difficult. And it’s about, just as you touched upon, bringing your focus back to how you choose to respond to it when it shows up. Choosing to respond in a workable way, a way that isn’t going to layer on all these extra pieces of difficulty and struggle on top of it when it shows up. So I’m really glad you mentioned that because I think that is important. Amber: Yeah. Yeah. I think that is important. I think that’s a really common misconception when someone starts back on this journey, whether it’s insomnia or trying to deal with anxiety, is then trying to figure out how am I supposed to be okay and enjoying this? And you really can’t, that’s not, that’s really not what we’re trying to do here. Amber: It’s okay to acknowledge that it’s hard. Martin: It might even be essential to acknowledge that it’s hard and that in itself might be part of opening up to it. Amber: Yeah. Agreed. Amber: I have memory of when I was young, when as a child and I’d get the stomach flu and I had to throw up. It was just a horrible thing. I did not wanna throw up. I would fight it, and my mom would come with me to the toilet, she would hold my head up and she would just rub my back. Amber: And she would keep saying, just let it come. Just let it come. And I trusted her, and I would let it come, and I would let you know, have the release, and then I would feel better. And it’s more like that to me now. It’s I can let this happen. It doesn’t feel good right now. Might even feel worse before it’s done, but it’s not gonna stay this way. Amber: I know that now. So that’s a different thing. And then instead of getting really frustrated with my busy brains that likes to think about everything and figure out everything. Now it’s more oh, let’s just see what’s on, what’s on TV tonight? What’s on the brain tonight? Amber: I’m more like, wow, look at my busy brain. Isn’t that amazing? It can bounce back and forth. To this, that and the other. And it goes fast. Sometimes it’s a little fast for me, but I’m actually more grateful for it now ’cause it helps me keep track of a lot of things and stay on top of a lot of things. Amber: So I look at that differently as well. Amber: Another big learning point is what what I can control and what I cannot, and to, there are a lot of things we cannot control and to try to control them, escape from them, or numb yourself to them, distract yourself, it just adds to something that might already be difficult. Amber: So letting those things be, and then finding where I can control, which is my actions, my response I went into, when I started this out, I did try some meditation, but my understanding of meditation has changed so much in the beginning. I was trying to force myself to relax. I was trying to make my really naturally busy brain not think of anything, and it just doesn’t happen. Amber: And so that would become more and more frustrating to me. It was just a frustrating experience. I thought I’m never gonna get this down. Now. I choose to relax. I can relax my muscles and my body and I can let myself breathe. But it, you mentioned the word intent or motive in the beginning. My intent of my motive is different. Amber: It’s not to force total relaxation and calm and quiet my brain and not have thoughts. Now it’s, I am relaxing myself to allow them, if that makes sense. And it has been that has been a real game changer for me as well, because I realize the more I do that, oh, actually, I. I don’t really feel that anxious anymore. Amber: It’s just gotten better and better. It doesn’t mean I don’t have anxiety, but I’ve, I have a very different approach now and it feels so doable to me compared to the way it used to feel. Martin: Would you say it’s almost like you are practicing and building skill in experiencing, I’m just gonna say anxiety ’cause that’s the last one that you mentioned. Martin: Experiencing anxiety with less struggle. So it’s showing up, but it’s losing the more you practice experiencing it with less resistance, it’s almost like it starts to lose its power and influence. So it still shows up, but it’s not as strong, it’s not as distracting. It’s not got that power it once maybe held over you. Amber: That’s exactly what’s happening now. The thing if I, if for example, if I go to bed and I’m worried about one of my kids or a patient I saw, and it’s leaving me with this unrest inside. I, now we’ll just realize, okay, I’m going into one of these loops where I’m thinking about this a lot, worrying about it all. Amber: The worry in the world is not gonna change it. I’m gonna just name I’m feeling this way because this is going on, or this is happening and I’m just gonna allow it to happen. I’m gonna relax and allow it to happen. I can maybe think of some more solutions tomorrow, or I can check in on the thing. I just start coming up with things I can do. Amber: To help it. And it really has it has more of a profound effect on me in helping me get through this. Martin: Whilst you were talking, I was thinking back to that alarm analogy you were sharing, and I was thinking that maybe a brand new member of staff, maybe they’ve just finished their training and they’re in that ward for the first time, hearing all those alarms go off, it must be terrifying. Martin: It feels like you’ve really thrown in the deep end, but then as you build up that experience of listening to those alarms going off nonstop choosing through experience on how you’re responding to each of one, each of them, the alarms are still going off, but they’re not having that huge effect on you, that huge physiological effect on you anymore. Amber: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s very it’s very comparable to that experience. Martin: How does this transfer to sleep then? So we’ve talked about opening up to the thoughts and the feelings. How does that get you to a place where you are not struggling with sleep anymore? Amber: With sleep it’s really was the same thing. Amber: The, I bring up anxiety a lot because I feel like the anxiety and the lack of sleep was just so intertwined with this experience. I did have to become more okay with being awake and that took time. And your direction on choosing values, value-based activities was very helpful to me because I’m very aware of what my values are and you know what things lead me more towards those and that type of life I wanna live and. Amber: So I did go I went through a very sleepless period of time. I think there was one time where I felt like I didn’t get sleep for three nights in a row. Sometimes I don’t know that we’re totally aware of how much sleep we actually get, but that’s what it felt like to me. And I actually carried on. Amber: I didn’t feel my best. Of course it wasn’t great, but I carried on very normally for those days and I was able to see, wow, I was able to accomplish, these things at work, at home. I had connection with people. I laughed with people. I had some good conversations. And so that was a big confidence builder to see that I actually really can do a lot without sleep. Amber: It doesn’t feel, the way I like to feel, but I can do it. And so it took some of the fear out of that for me, and that was very helpful. Martin: Maybe it comes down to exploring what we can do that might make this whole experience a little bit less difficult or a little bit less traumatic. It sounds like one way that you moved toward that goal was by committing to actions that reflected your values, living the kind of life you wanted to live, even when sleep wasn’t showing up. Martin: And by doing that, I think a natural byproduct maybe, is that we do start to get a little bit more comfortable with being awake because it’s not having such a huge impact over our lives anymore. Even if it’s just a 10th of a percentage point better, we’ve got that 10th of a percentage point more control over our lives now. Martin: It can snowball. So we become a little bit more comfortable with being awake. That’s not to say we want to be awake, but we just start to get a little bit more comfortable with it. We are less resistant to it. It’s not gonna pull us into quite so much of a struggle and in effect. That kind lowers it down on our list of priorities, perhaps for our problem solving brain. Martin: Our brain’s oh, maybe we don’t have to fight this quite so hard. We don’t have to engage in this battle. And when we are not engaged in that battle conditions for sleep just become better because we’re not in the middle of a battleground at two o’clock in the morning. We’re awake. We’re experiencing all these thoughts and these feelings, but we’re not in a battleground anymore. Amber: That’s absolutely correct. And since then, my attitude now I’ve had a couple of circumstances with maybe a teenage child that’s, been late for curfew coming home or maybe a medical issue with somebody that I need to help with. It’s late in tonight. And instead of thinking, oh my gosh, I’m not gonna get sleep now, I’m like, bring it. I can stay up and I can handle tomorrow. I’ve done it for three nights in a row. Amber: I, it doesn’t scare me like it used to. So it’s a big shift in my perspective on that now. Martin: That is a really big shift. I’m curious to know, as you were practicing this whole new approach that we’ve been talking about, did you find that progress was just it was kinda like this up upward curve where things just progressively got better and easier and less struggle. Martin: Or was it more kind of ups and downs, or was it more just like someone had thrown a plate of spaghetti against the wall and it was just all over the place? What was it like for you? Amber: I like the spaghetti analogy that it probably felt like that for a while. All over the place. I keep using the term cognitive understanding because in my head I could understand what you were saying or what I was hearing from other people. Amber: It made sense to me. It resonated and I knew this was the way to do it, but anything else I’ve had to learn, whether it is becoming a nurse or a nurse practitioner or I used to run a lot of marathons, learning the best way to do that. Learning it in the book can make absolute sense. Amber: And you think you’ve got it, but then actually putting it into reality and doing it experientially is an entirely different thing. And that does not come as quickly and it takes a lot of practice. And that’s exactly what happened with this. It took a lot of practice and I had a lot of ups and downs. I have a plate of spaghetti. Martin: Yeah. And like when you’re learning any new skill there’s gonna be times when it maybe things feel easy, that you’re making great progress, you’re ahead of schedule, and then there’s gonna be times where it feels like nothing is working. You’re doomed to failure, you’re beyond help that you need to go back down that rabbit hole of looking for some something else to do instead. Martin: I love the fact that you drew in your experience, in marathon running in your own career, the skills, achievements, they take a lot of practice, they take a lot of action, they take a commitment to action, and they also come with ups and downs, and they also come with all those thoughts and feelings that I just gave a few examples of, this isn’t working. We should give in. Martin: If we think of where we’re most skilled in life, that wasn’t just immediately given to us, we had to earn it, and we earned it through committed action. Even if it’s just doing a little bit every day, it all adds up. It’s just continuing to do things that move us in the direction that we want to be heading. Amber: Absolutely. And I do think when you start making that initial improvement, so when I first started to improve and I had a few good nights of sleep and I thought, oh, this is it. I’ve arrived. I figured it out. And then you have your first whatever you wanna call it, set bump, or, barrier in the road and you have another bad night. Amber: It can be really deflating. ’cause you thought, oh, I figured this out and now this isn’t working, and what did I do wrong? You start, you catch yourself going through all of the same rabbit hole again. And so it is, there is a lot of patients required with those setbacks, they are going to continue to happen. Amber: And I heard. I don’t remember where I heard it, but I heard someone say that they those types of setbacks come up for a reason. It’s an opportunity to practice. It just means that you need to practice again. It’s not really a bad thing, it’s just an opportunity to refine a skill. And again, changing the way I looked at those, ’cause those were pretty, they’re pretty hard, those setbacks once you start on the road to recovery. Martin: 100%. And especially like you said early on especially if you’re really early in your journey and maybe you string some good nights together, or you have a few days where you notice you’re not completely overwhelmed with all these thoughts and feelings and you can feel really confident and motivated, yes, this is working, I’m doing really well. Martin: And it can be so deflating and difficult when the difficult stuff shows up again. And even when you are further along in your journey, there can be lots of ups and downs and it can feel like you’re, it’s almost like your brain is, whoa, you’re back to square one. Martin: Everything you’ve been doing up to this point was a complete waste of time, waste of effort. The truth is that it’s just your brain looking out for you. Again, the truth is you’ve just had this experience of some difficult nights or some nights where less sleep happened or some nights of no sleep, or you’ve noticed those thoughts and feelings showing up and gaining a little bit more power. Martin: That’s what’s happened. Anything else that you are getting from that is stuff that we are understandably adding on top because we still don’t want to experience it. But what matters is identifying this is a normal part of any journey and that it is about how we choose to respond. And that’s something that we always have power over. Martin: We have the power over our choice of actions, and it’s easy to respond in the way we wanna respond. When things feel good, when things feel easy, it’s when things feel difficult, that it’s most important we respond in the way that reflects how we wanna respond, and that’s really what counts. Martin: How long would you say it took for you to get to a point where insomnia and all the thoughts and the feelings that can show up with it and after it weren’t creating a struggle for you that you could do things that matter, live your life, do what’s important to you, independently off sleep, and even in the presence of uncomfortable, difficult thoughts and feelings. Amber: I think it’s hard to put a specific number on that because in the journey, I feel like I, I would go to that for quite a while and then maybe have a little, regression or whatever, and then I would go back to that. Amber: But I will say, I think over time those regressions would get further and further apart. And so maybe six to eight months is where I started feeling like I was settling in back into my more normal self, my more baseline self. Martin: Yeah, that’s helpful because I think it’s a reminder that really what we’ve been talking about this whole time are skills. They’re action-based skills and skills. Take time to learn, to develop, to practice. There’s gonna be ups and downs, there’s gonna be setbacks. And that takes time. We all obviously want immediate results. We wanna be able to just deal with this right now. Martin: If I could offer that to people, I would offer it. I’d be a trillionaire. But it doesn’t work that way. It’s not easy, it’s difficult, and it requires ongoing practice. Amber: I can honestly say that even though there were times where I just feel like this really brought me to my knees I wouldn’t change it now because of the benefit I’ve gotten from it. I don’t think there, there’s things that I don’t think I could have learned in another way. I think it’s benefited how I’m able to help others and of course my values, my roles, my role as mother. Amber: Professionally as nurse practitioner or family member or friend, the people in my life, those are really important to me. And so this outlook and this focus of what I can and cannot control and how to allow these things to move through, to just be able to move through them and not go down the rabbit hole has been really helpful. Amber: I’m very empathetic towards people that are going through something similar and it doesn’t have to be insomnia because so many struggles go down this road, right? They don’t necessarily have to be insomnia. And of course professionally I hear a lot about these types of things. I’m in that type of a position, and so I do, I have a lot of empathy. Amber: I understand how things feel how difficult thoughts and feelings can fill, and I can give better guidance and direction. I can do that for my children and other people in my life. Martin: It can be really hard to think of any positive aspects to this struggle when you are in the midst of it. It can almost sound disrespectful to think that there could be a growth opportunity, or it could have somehow have any positive impact on our lives. But a common theme that runs through so many of these podcast episodes is this sense of growth that can only come from that journey that has been experienced. Amber: I mentioned how when I have had setbacks with insomnia or anxiety, I can see it more as an opportunity to practice. And so now when other things occur in my life that are difficult I think I can go to that maybe a little more quicker now because of that experience that here’s another opportunity. Amber: This is happening. How can I go about handling it? What can I control, what can I not? And let myself move through it. And then I would say even just day to day, I think I take more I have more gratitude for things too, because. I’m not struggling with the battle and the calv calvary, as you mentioned. Amber: Now I have more awareness of things around me that are important to me, or even small things like, good weather or flower. It does, it opens your eyes to other things. Martin: These are transferable skills. Martin: They don’t exist only for insomnia, only for anxiety. They can enrich or enhance your life in so many other ways, and that’s where you can end up coming out ahead. So like you shared, maybe now you’re finding yourself better at practicing gratitude. You find yourself better able to focus on values-based action. Martin: Maybe you’re getting more from life because your values have just become more front and center. And so you’re ensuring that your actions reflect who you are, who you want to be and your, you focus, the focus of your attention is expanded. So maybe you are able to savor a few more of those moments that we might once have been on autopilot and missed out on. Martin: If someone with chronic insomnia is listening. And they feel as though they’ve tried everything. They’re beyond help. They’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia. Martin: What would you say to them? Amber: Yes, I’ve anticipated that question and that’s really the reason I did this. I was a little reluctant in saying yes, but because this helped me so much, I couldn’t say no to you. Because this is doable. Even though you may be at the point where you feel like you’re completely broken, you’re completely alone. Amber: No one understands. I’ve tried, A through Z, it’s not working. It is doable. It’s not gonna happen overnight. But it will happen. And it’s the key things that we’ve been talking about. It’s practicing, it’s being patient with yourself in the process. It’s being kind with yourself in the process. Amber: It’s identifying what you have control over and what you do not. And, practicing those things over and over is really what will help this settle down. It’s very doable. Martin: Great. Thank you again, Amber, for coming on. It’s just been a pleasure listening to you describe your journey and your transformation. So thank you. Amber: Thank you. Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to get your life back from insomnia, I would love to help. You can learn more about the sleep coaching programs I offer at Insomnia Coach — and, if you have any questions, you can email me. Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Please share this episode!

Before insomnia entered Abbie’s life, sleep was effortless. She’d never had to think about it. She fell asleep quickly, stayed asleep, and moved through her days without giving sleep much attention at all. It was simply there — reliable and unremarkable. That changed in the fall of 2021 after a short illness. One sleepless night turned into another, and before long, sleep became the center of everything. What started as confusion quickly grew into anxiety and pressure. Each night felt like a test. Each morning felt heavier. As the nights passed, fear took over — fear of being awake, fear of not functioning, fear that something was permanently wrong. Like many people facing insomnia, Abbie did what made sense. She tried to fix it. She went to bed earlier and earlier. She canceled plans. She followed strict routines. She tried supplements. She searched for answers. And each attempt came with hope — followed by disappointment when sleep didn’t show up. Over time, life began to shrink around sleep, and the struggle only intensified. Days became just as difficult as nights. Her mind stayed locked on one question: Am I going to sleep tonight? Anxiety filled the hours. Dread set in as evening approached. Even when she was exhausted, her heart raced and her thoughts refused to slow down. What began to shift things wasn’t a new fix — it was a change in how she responded. Abbie started noticing that withdrawing from life wasn’t helping. Staying in bed wasn’t restoring her energy. And fighting her thoughts wasn’t bringing relief. Slowly, she began doing something different: showing up to her life even when sleep felt uncertain. She experimented with staying up later instead of trying to force sleep. She returned to the gym. She made plans. She studied. She lived — without waiting for sleep to cooperate. And over time, something important changed. Sleep became less of a battleground. Her thoughts lost their grip. And trust — in herself and in her body — started to rebuild. In this conversation, Abbie shares what it was like to move through insomnia, how her relationship with sleep changed, and why easing the struggle — not fixing sleep — made all the difference. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin: Okay. Abbie, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast. Abbie: Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here. Martin: Let’s start right at the very beginning. When did your issues with sleep first begin and what do you feel caused those issues with sleep? Abbie: Yeah. It was fall 2021, so like almost four years ago, which is crazy because it feels so vivid in my memories. Abbie: But I had gotten sick, I think it was like the cold or a flu or something, just like a normal sick, and I wasn’t able to sleep which was really jarring for me at the time because prior to this sort of period of insomnia, I had been a really great sleeper. Like I, had my whole life I had basically like. Abbie: I never really thought much about sleep. I fell asleep immediately. I stayed asleep. Yeah I had gotten sick, I wasn’t able to sleep. And then I remember the next night I was like, okay, tonight’s the night like, I have to sleep. So I was already, like putting that pressure on sleep it has to be tonight. Abbie: And so that kind of started, I would say like the feedback loop of okay, I am stressed about sleep. The more I stress about sleep, the less I’m gonna sleep. Yeah, I think I was also dealing with just like a period of more heightened anxiety in my life at the time too. I was applying to graduate school and taking, the admissions tests for that and so maybe it was just like, kinda like the perfect storm. Abbie: I was like, okay, if I’m gonna get better, I need to sleep. I think it was also like, this was the first time in my life I had experienced a sleepless night. And so it was just like, that was really uncomfortable, like laying there awake all night. The longer you’re awake, the more stressed you’re getting, your heart’s kind of beating fast. Abbie: Like the whole thing was just uncomfortable and new for me. So I was like I don’t want that to happen again. I better sleep tonight. Abbie: I feel like each night I wasn’t sleeping, I was just getting more and more anxious about sleeping. I think I was like a week in at that point and I had probably slept two hours each night and I was like, what is going on? Abbie: Am I ever gonna sleep again? And yeah, I mean it was, I would fall asleep around four or 5:00 AM and then be back up again at 6:00 AM for work. And yeah it was just super uncomfortable and yeah, anyone who’s. Insomnia knows how stressful it is. Abbie: It was like, every hour that passes, I’m like, okay, I gotta get up in what, in three hours, two hours, one hour. And then, just this intense desire to stay in bed in the mornings. I think to see if you’re tired and you haven’t slept, and you’re like, all I wanna do is stay in bed. Abbie: I do think, like looking back, I think having my work routine and schedule was like really hard at the time, but really beneficial in some ways because I couldn’t just sit in bed and all day and try to go back to bed and I had to get up and get out and go to work. And that was also ended up being, I think, a good distraction. Abbie: At least for like the eight hours a day I was working. I wasn’t thinking about sleep. I think that was positive. Martin: What about that day, those days when you didn’t have any work obligations? Were things different then? Abbie: Yeah, I would definitely I think early on I would definitely, stay in bed all morning, like trying to quote unquote rest or see if maybe I could eventually fall asleep. Abbie: And just like really dreading the day because I had slept it all and I was like, Ugh, another day I’m gonna be really tired all day. It’s gonna be so bad. Like kind of those typical anxious, catastrophic thoughts of I just, I don’t wanna do the day. Like I didn’t get any sleep. So if there was, if I didn’t have work and nothing was like forcing me outta bed, I think it was, it would’ve been hard. Martin: So at this point. Things are really difficult as you’ve just described. And when we face difficulties in life or problems in life, we look to solve them. Martin: So what was your next step? What other things were you trying to do to get your sleep back on track and get yourself back to where you used to be? Abbie: Yeah, I think I was trying everything. One of the things I started doing early on was like, canceling all my plans and I would get off work and, as soon as I was done with work like the dread and the anxiety about sleeping that night would kick in. Abbie: And so I would be like, okay, I gotta go home. I gotta make dinner and I gotta get in bed. So I was like, my bedtime was becoming earlier and earlier even though I just, I wasn’t tired. And I think I was also pretty much trying every sleep supplement out there that there is like about a month in, I think I’d seen my doctor and she had prescribed me I think it was like Ambien or something, and I never ended up taking it, but I did try every over the counter supplement, magnesium, melatonin, all the things. Abbie: And I would get like really excited like, okay, this is gonna be the thing, like this is gonna work for me. And then every time it didn’t, it was like a letdown of okay, it was like more evidence in my mind that, my sleep is broken and there’s nothing out there that’s gonna fix it. Martin: I think a lot of people are gonna identify with that. Martin: And all the things you shared are completely logical to try, right? If we want more sleep to happen it’s almost ground into us that we go to bed earlier, that it’s important to go to bed early get more sleep, give sleep that opportunity to show up. And there can be, it can be, it’s almost like we can become really enthusiastic or we can just try so hard that it backfires on us to the point where we do less with our lives and sleep then grows in importance. Martin: It becomes more of a focus. So it’s almost like we’re up in the stakes. It becomes even more important for us to perform sleep and then when it doesn’t happen as we want it to. You did a great job of just describing what that’s like yourself. We can just, it feels, it can feel like a personal failure and it can reinforce perhaps this belief that there is something uniquely wrong, that maybe our sleep system is somehow broken. Martin: But the truth of the matter is, it’s. Perhaps it’s all the ongoing efforts and the trying, which now exists when it never existed before, when we slept fine, that might be the true source of the problem. Abbie: Yeah, definitely. And I think yeah, along the lines of just like trying everything to control sleep, I was like doing all the sleep hygiene, things like that were recommended. Abbie: Like I was no screens before bed. Like I just, I had this whole routine of I got a no caffeine, no alcohol, blah, blah, blah. That was just like adding more and more things when, like you just said in the past I had no sleep routine. Like I was, I would pass out on the couch watching TV and go to bed. Abbie: So yeah, I think that’s exactly right. Martin: Often as we’re engaged in this pursuit of sleep, we end up removing things from our lives that, either give us meaning or are enjoyable. And that could be something like we, we might give up coffee altogether, for example, even though that’s something we really enjoy. Martin: We remove that from our lives. We remove TV from our lives. We remove going out with friends late at night from our lives. And so our sleep generally stays the same because sleep doesn’t really care about any of that stuff. But at the same time, our situation has gotten worse because we’re taking all of that stuff away in order to serve sleep. Martin: And it just makes us, it can make us just feel trapped in this just endless spiral of more difficulty and a less joy from life. More withdrawal and more struggle. Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely think that was my experience. The more I. I stopped my usual routine. The worse, I think the worse that it got, for sure. Abbie: Which is counterintuitive at the time I was like, I can’t be out until 10 o’clock, like I gotta be in bed. And that ended up being one of the things that I, that down the road really helped me was actually staying out late and doing things late at night and doing all these things despite not being able to sleep. Martin: I’m curious, you mentioned earlier that you went to the doctor and they gave you a prescription for the Ambien, but you didn’t end up taking end. Curious to know why that was? Abbie: Yeah. I was really nervous about taking it, but I think what I was really nervous about is that I, that it would work and that I wouldn’t rely on it to sleep and. Abbie: That was like my worst nightmare. It was like, okay, I can suffer and try to sleep and all these things, and if I took this medication and it worked is that gonna be the rest of my life? Am I never gonna be able to sleep again without this medication? So I definitely was like, I think I was really tempted and really close to probably taking it after a month of not sleeping, but I was like yeah, I just wa I didn’t wanna rip the bandaid off, I guess you could say and go down this like spiral of that I felt like I, I couldn’t get back from. Martin: And I think that’s a good illustration of how any effort or anything that we do to try and make sleep happen can so easily backfire. Because if we try something and it feels like it works. We can feel that reinforces this belief or this idea that we need something to generate sleep, that we’re incapable of generating it by ourselves. Martin: And on the other hand, if we try something and it doesn’t work, then we reinforce this belief that we need. We still need to keep looking, that we can’t generate sleep by ourselves, that we failed at that thing or that we failed at sleep. So we’ve got this potential that regardless of the outcome, every time we try, we might be reinforcing this idea or this belief that there’s something wrong with our sleep system, that there’s something wrong with our situation, that something is broken when that’s never the case, as we’ll explore a little bit later in our conversation. Abbie: Yeah, definitely. I think the reliance, like you said on these external things was really big for me early on and that didn’t end up being the solution. Martin: You also made a good point too, that if we do feel like we’re reliant on something, there might be a point in the future where we don’t wanna be reliant on that thing anymore. Martin: So if we haven’t addressed what the real root cause of this issue might be then we are gonna be having to revisit that at some point in the future. So it never really goes away. It’s always gonna be with us. Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. It definitely felt like a short term solution and I was like, I gotta try, I gotta try something else. Martin: People that aren’t too familiar with insomnia will usually only think of insomnia as like a nighttime problem, but when we’ve been struggling with it or we’ve got that experience of struggling with it, we know that it really is a 24 hour problem, right? It affects our nights and it affects our days. Martin: Maybe it affects our days even more than it affects our nights. I’m curious to hear from you. How was this affecting your days? Not only in terms of like you touched upon your, those kind of withdrawal from the activities and doing things that are important to you, but the way your mind was responding. What was that experience like for you? Abbie: Yeah, I would say it was like really intense anxiety. Pretty much from the moment I got outta bed of just these thoughts of am I gonna sleep tonight? And like I had said going to work was a good distraction, but of course I was like exhausted at work and I was like, I don’t know how many more days and nights of this like I can do. Abbie: And you’re just spiraling. Is this permanent? Is this forever? And I think I also developed a lot of health anxiety around it, like I had all these concerns is this gonna have long-term sort of negative consequences on my health? I think, rightfully there’s so much out there about the number one thing you could do for your health and your longevity is sleep. Abbie: And you Google sleep and there’s 15 articles about the negative consequences of not sleeping. And not to say that the science isn’t true. I just think that was like really unhelpful for me at the time of okay, not only is the consequence, like I’m tired and anxious and I, I physically feel bad, but there’s, if this keeps going this is gonna be bad for my health in the long term. Abbie: So I don’t know. All these thoughts were like spiraling all day long. And then as soon as it. I got dark out, like as soon as the sun started to go down I would get this like intense feeling of dread. And yeah. So it was definitely, like you said, an all day thing, not just like a nighttime thing. Abbie: I think at night it was definitely more I’m sitting in bed and my heart is racing and my thoughts are racing and the more you’re trying to sleep, the more your heart is racing. And so it’s like a lot of physical symptoms. And then during the day it was just like a lot of my mind is consumed with, am I gonna sleep tonight? Martin: The messaging around sleep out there is very focused on sleep is very important and I would agree with that. Sleep is very important, just like breathing is very important and we’re still waiting for a study to come out that shows that insomnia causes any health problem or increases risk of mortality. But boy, when you read some of that stuff that’s online, it really does sound like a life or death situation. And when you are already putting so much importance on sleep, it can just make things so much more difficult. Martin: Because it, again, it ups the stakes, right? And you’re gonna put more pressure on yourself to perform sleep. So yeah, I just wanted to emphasize that yes, sleep is important, but the body can generate it by itself just like it generates breathing by itself. And I think a lot of people here listening to this will really identify with how you described what your mind was doing at the time, it was problem solving for you. It was trying to fix this problem. It was brainstorming, and as it was doing that, it was generating lots of difficult feelings, difficult thoughts. It was generating anxiety to ensure that you were giving it attention. Martin: And there’s also that fatigue, right? That sense of exhaustion. And it can just be when you combine that with your mind is just being focused on sleep and generating all these predictions or these stories it can be really hard to focus and to concentrate on doing stuff that matters. Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. Abbie: That, that was definitely my experience. I think, the anxiety is like enough to deal with and then you’re exhausted, and so that’s only feeding it. And you, I just remember feeling okay, if I don’t like. Die from lack of sleep I’m gonna lose my mind. Yeah, it was just a big spiral. Martin: How did you respond to what your mind was doing at the time? Abbie: At the time I had family and friends and a partner who were really supportive and I could confide in and that was great. But I also think unless you’ve experienced insomnia, I still just felt like very alone, in the experience. Abbie: And finding Insomnia Coach was like huge in realizing that I wasn’t alone and that these aren’t unique thoughts and experiences in, in a good way. So yeah, I was trying to cope I think, as best as I could. I was distracting myself. Trying to distract myself at work and yeah, as soon as I realized that the withdrawing from day-to-day activities was making it worse I think that was a really good kind of switch for me in okay, if I can’t sleep, I can’t control the sleep, but I can control my response and I can control what I’m doing. Abbie: So instead of going to bed at 8:00 PM like I’m gonna go and go to the gym. And I, with no expectation that the gym was gonna make me tired, just like I like to go to the gym and I’m gonna, if I’m up anyway, like I’m gonna study for the GRE and do my grad school application. Abbie: So I think, yeah, as soon as I had that mindset shift from withdrawing to. Going back to my normal routine. If anything it, it was a good distraction. Martin: It sounds like you noticed this conflict between some of the thoughts or the stories that your mind was your problem solving brain was telling you as it was trying to fix this problem for you, like you need to withdraw, you can’t do those things. Martin: You need to do less. You need to say, no, you need to go home. All of these things. And compared to your experience, your experience was telling you well, actually withdrawing isn’t making things any better. It’s not making me feel less fatigued or more rested. It’s certainly not making my life any better. Martin: And once you notice that conflict, maybe there was this kinda light bulb moment there that I can hear all these thoughts. I can listen to all these thoughts and stories. I don’t necessarily need to fight them. I just need to respond in a way that’s of my choosing. I get to decide how to respond to these thoughts. Martin: I don’t have to battle with them, struggle with them. I don’t have to let them control me ultimately. I still have the power here. Abbie: Yeah. I do think that was like the first sort of light bulb going off of okay, all of my thoughts and beliefs about anything but about sleep are not necessarily reality. Abbie: I don’t have to believe that, I have this thought, I’m never gonna sleep again. That doesn’t make it true. Or you have this thought like, I need to go home and cancel all my plans and otherwise we’re gonna be exhausted. I was exhausted anyway yeah I do think the realization that I didn’t have to, I guess believe my. Abbie: My thoughts was also like a really big switch for me. Martin: What did it feel like to realize that what your brain might be telling you or what your brain might be saying might not actually be true? Abbie: Yeah, honestly, it felt like a big relief. I and I also think I realize the worse I feel and the more negative the thoughts, the less true my thinking is and the less serious I need to take my thinking. Abbie: So yeah, I think this big relief of there’s a whole reality that exists out in the world and I can always come back to that and whatever my thoughts, my brain are telling me, it doesn’t always match up with what the reality is. And so as soon as I gave myself like, permission to not believe my thoughts, and I still practice this today. Abbie: Like it’s not easy, but you have an anxious thought or something and you’re like, okay, or here’s the alternative and this isn’t true. So yeah, as soon as I gave myself that permission to, to not one take my thinking so seriously and to two not trust it, especially like when I’m feeling down or bad I think yeah, that, that was a huge sort of flip for me and in my kind of journey with insomnia, but also just like my overall mental health journey. Martin: I think it might be human nature to resist what’s difficult or uncomfortable. So for many of us. We will resist anxiety, for example, or try really hard to fight it when it shows up or avoid it from showing up in the first place. As you develop this insight or this light bulb moment that maybe the thoughts aren’t always true, did that change how you were able to respond to them? Abbie: I think the big thing was just like not taking it so seriously like not taking every thought so seriously. And that in turn helped me take some of the pressure off of sleep because if, if I am, my brain is telling me that, if I don’t sleep tonight there’s gonna be all these consequences and blah, blah, blah, then, but if I don’t have to believe that, then it’s not so much pressure that I sleep tonight or the next night or whenever. Abbie: I do think like getting some distance from my own thoughts was also good. Like I, you’re just, I was so in my own head and every thought that came up, I had to follow that train of thought and act on it. When I realized that I didn’t I think I had a lot more freedom to, to actually do the things that felt Right. Martin: So when you found Insomnia Coach, at this point, you’d already been trying lots of different things. What made you think there might be something here rather than it just being yet another one of these things that you’ll probably try and not get much from? What made it feel different? Abbie: Yeah, I think the main thing was there, this sort of like notion that there’s actually nothing to do, I think a lot of other content, like I had mentioned was like, do this, and this before better or don’t do this and this. And when I found Insomnia Coach, I just really, it was the first time I had seen the messaging like, the more we try, the less sleep will come. Abbie: And so I think when I first found it, I was like, it’s like when some, when you’re stressed and someone tells you to calm down, you’re like, yeah, okay. Stop trying. Sure. That I think at the time seemed like pretty much impossible. But yeah, I think the, there was a lot of content in the emails that you sent that was like one, like I mentioned, making me feel like I’m not alone in this and this isn’t unique to me. Abbie: And two. Maybe I can just let go a little bit, like maybe I can stop trying so hard. And there were some other like specific sort of techniques and things that, that you had mentioned that ended up being really helpful for me, which I am happy to talk about. But yeah, I think it was just the permission to stop trying so hard. Martin: If we are able to remember a time when sleep wasn’t an issue or a concern, what were we doing to make sleep happen so well back then? And maybe our own experience can reveal the most valuable insight, which is that sleep was effortless. It required no effort, there were no rules, there were no rituals. It just happened by itself, and that’s really where we want to get back to. Abbie: Yeah. Yeah. I think that sort of idea you’re mentioning about some of the most valuable information being like my own experience. I think that came up again and again it later in my journey with insomnia. Like when I would have like bumps along the road, I would go back to okay, I’ve had insomnia before. Abbie: I pretty much didn’t sleep for like months on end. And I survived, and I. I went to work and I functioned and all these things like that is evidence for me in my mind that I can do it again. And I think what made this like first like intense bout so hard was that I, this was the first time it had happened. Abbie: Like I didn’t have evidence that I could go back to my baseline, but as soon as I had that, like first night of like normal sleep, I think that was really powerful for me to be like, okay here’s your own experience and evidence that it’s possible to sleep. Again. Martin: It really is a learning experience, I think. Martin: And there’s that classic phrase that we don’t know what we don’t know but if we can approach things with some kindness that we aren’t these all encompassing, all seeing individual geniuses, that there are gonna be things that we don’t know. And we can be kind to it to ourselves about that and be curious and be willing to learn or experiment. Martin: There is so much value there because I think that really is what gives us the opportunity to make change happen. Abbie: Yeah, I definitely wish I had been easier on myself when things were at their peak. I think I, yeah, just like the self-talk and like the things you’re telling yourself why can’t I do this? Abbie: My sleep must be broken. It’s all just negative reinforcement instead of positive sort of affirmations for yourself. I think that can be really hard in the moment. But yeah, looking back, I, I think that would’ve been really useful. Martin: It’s amazing how hard we can be on ourselves when things, when we’re experiencing difficulty and struggle, because I like to believe that there’s good in all of us, and I think that most of us, if we were sitting down with a loved one and they were describing exactly what we were going through themselves, we would talk to them in a completely different way to how we talk to ourselves when we are experiencing that exact same thing. Abbie: Yeah. That is so true. I think that’s something I, I’m still working on, like in every situation what would I tell my loved one, or my friend or my family like I would, if the roles were reversed and a friend had come to me with this insomnia problem, like I would’ve been really like concerned and worried for them. Abbie: But of course I wouldn’t have been like. And I would be like, you’re gonna sleep again. Of course you’re gonna sleep again. And I couldn’t tell myself that at the time. Martin: And if nothing else, again, if we pull on our own experience, we can ask ourselves, how does talking to myself in this way? Or how does acting toward myself in this way help? Martin: Is it improving the situation? Is it making me feel better? Is it helping me emerge from the struggle? Or is it making things more difficult? And I’m a big, I’m a huge proponent of us using our own experience as our best guide, because every person is the expert on themselves. I’m not the expert of anyone other than myself. Martin: But what I can do is encourage people to look within themselves and reflect on their own experience. When it comes to so many struggles in life maybe all of them, the answers that we need are already within us. It’s just a case of. Looking for them. And sometimes we need some kind of external influence or source to tease them out, but all the answers are already within us. Abbie: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point. Martin: Let’s get into the changes that you made, that you found most helpful. What ones would you like to share with us? Abbie: Yeah, the most like tangible thing I did was give myself this sort of like wake window in which I couldn’t go to bed. I think I started with three or 4:00 AM or something, and I was like, I’m not even gonna attempt to sleep. Abbie: I have to stay up until 3:00 AM and then I can get in bed and whatever happens, but like until 3:00 AM I am watching tv, I’m doing something, whatever. And I think this like definitely tricked my brain from I have to sleep, I have to sleep, I have to sleep to, I can’t sleep until this time. Abbie: I think that was like really powerful for me. And, it wasn’t like a cure all, like all of a sudden I was sleeping, but it took probably a month when I was like slowly pushing back this sleep sort of window earlier and eventually I would, it would be like 2:00 AM and I would be like passing out to sleep on the couch. Abbie: And I was like, okay, we’ll push it back to 1:00 AM and midnight. And that was really helpful for me. And something that I used, even once my sleep improved, if I had, a bad night or a bad week, I’d be like, okay we’re going back to this like wake window and tonight I’m up until three and we’ll see what happens. Abbie: So yeah it was totally just a mental thing of telling yourself you need to sleep versus telling yourself you have to stay awake. Which is such a simple thing when you, when I look back, but that was like really transformative. Yeah. And the other thing, like I talked about, I think was just like really returning to my routine. Abbie: So like I, I would hang out with friends after work. I would go to the gym, take, my roommate at the time was like a night shift nurse, so she was up anyway, so I’d be like, let’s go do something. And, I’d be out, it’d be like midnight and I’d be like, okay. That was all time in which I was distracted and not thinking about sleep. Abbie: And then I come home and I found sleek to just be a lot easier as soon as I, yeah, sleep to be a lot easier. When I wasn’t laying in bed at 8:00 PM every night waiting for it to happen. Martin: I think what you’ve shared is a great example of there’s no unique way of doing this that is gonna work or be appropriate for everyone. Martin: It’s about finding what’s helpful for you with the intent, as long as the intention is workable, as long as you’re not trying to control what can’t be controlled. So for you, your intent was to move away from trying to make sleep happen. And as a way of helping you reach that goal, you decided I’m gonna make myself stay awake till 3:00 AM instead of trying to fall asleep, I’m gonna try to stay awake. Martin: And that could be such a powerful mindset shift, right? Because then when we’re trying to stay awake. What might happen differently? What was your experience? How did things change when you went from trying to sleep to trying to stay awake? Abbie: Yeah, I just felt like the, I had a new goal, like my brain had a new problem to solve, and the problem was like, we gotta stay up till 3:00 AM and I gotta find stuff to do until 3:00 AM. Abbie: So that was helpful. And just yeah, taking the pressure off from and getting outta my own thoughts of okay, it’s another hour and I’m outta sleep. It’s another hour and I’m not asleep. And into just a more calm and peaceful state of mind. And then of course once that happens, like I would just, I would fall asleep. Abbie: And even on those nights, like when I. I was trying to make to 3:00 AM and I would like doze off at two or something. I would, the next day I would be like, okay, like what did I do? Like how did I do it? And every night it was like I didn’t do anything, like my body just fell asleep and there was enough sleep drive to, to put me to sleep. Abbie: And then, yeah, as soon as I had, like even I, like I mentioned I was really sleeping like very little. So even when I had three or four hours of sleep a night, that was again, more evidence in my mind that my sleep is not broken and it is possible. So it was that positive feedback cycle, whereas before it had been this negative feedback cycle. Martin: When you weren’t trying to make sleep happen, you were now all of a sudden trying to stay awake. That urge to sleep just became stronger because you’re no longer putting that pressure on or putting the effort in. And that came too with the bonus of, it’s a powerful reminder that your sleep system is still there, it’s still intact, it’s not broken. Martin: You are feeling that sense of sleepiness and a sense of sleepiness isn’t always required for sleep to happen, but it can be a nice reassuring reminder when you feel that sleepiness and the difficulty staying awake. And even if someone is listening to this and they don’t really wanna stay awake until 3:00 AM again, that’s not a requirement. Martin: A lot of people just look to stay awake later than they have been. If they feel like they go into bed earlier and it’s not really doing much for them, then how about we just move it a little bit later? Martin: It’s just a tool that’s there for you to practice if and when you as the expert on yourself, feel is gonna be useful. Abbie: Yeah, definitely. We’re trying to get away from here’s the one thing that’s gonna fix everything and that’s not the case. But I do think anything that can flipped the script in your brain from sleep whether it’s distraction or whether it’s staying up later or whatever, I think can be really useful. Martin: Yeah. And sometimes staying up later can be more appealing than going to bed earlier. If we find that when we go to bed earlier is a lot of tossing and turning and struggling and battling, it can be somewhat of a relief to give ourselves permission to stay out of bed and not go to bed until later. Martin: Whereas on the other hand, someone else listening to this might find that time in bed quite pleasant. In which case, why not go to bed at the time you’ve been going? It really does, again, come down to the individual, but there is that potential opportunity, bonus opportunity there of being able to do something else earlier in the night rather than struggling. Martin: The other helpful change that you’ve said that you made was reengaging in life and doing stuff for example, going to the gym which maybe you were doing less of in response to the difficulties with sleep. And I think maybe a lot of people listening to this can recognize that. Yeah I would love to do all these things that matter to me. Martin: But it just feels so difficult to do that. It maybe, it even feels impossible to do that. I’m curious to know if you had those kind of thoughts, and if so, how did you stay committed or how were you willing to experiment with this idea of still doing some of this stuff, re-engaging in this stuff that matters? Abbie: Yeah, I, I think early on, like fighting the urge to just go home and do nothing was so hard. Like the last thing it did, it felt impossible to think I’m gonna go do something with friends after work, or I’m gonna go to the gym or whatever. And I did kind of shy away from everything for a long time because it was so hard. But I think even like that first time that I made plans after work or went to the gym and realized like, okay, nothing bad happened I’m still just as tired as I was before. It wasn’t, I think also at this point, like my body was in such like fight or flight mode that like nothing, like I just was exhausted and nothing was making it better or worse honestly. Abbie: And so when I realized okay, I can either. Go home and toss and turn in bed all night and feel horrible. Or I can go to the movies after work and then come home and feel horrible. I’m gonna pick the thing that at least gives me a little bit of joy for the time that I’m doing it. And yeah not to say doing any of that, like somehow cured my sleep or anything. Abbie: But I started slowly to like care a little bit less and less that I wasn’t sleeping because it, one of the things I had been telling myself is okay, why is it so bad that I can’t sleep? It’s so bad because I’m not gonna be able to live my life. Abbie: I’m not gonna be able to go to work. I’m gonna get fired. All these things. And when you realize that, okay, these things are not conditional on sleep, like I can still do these things. Despite whether or not I sleep, I think there was a lot of freedom in that. Martin: What did progress for you look like? How did you measure progress? Abbie: I definitely think early on it was still all about sleep and the quality of my sleep. And every night was like either a success or a failure. Like I either slept or I didn’t, and things were very black and white. And I think slowly over time I was able to realize, okay, maybe there’s a little bit less anxiety and a little bit less dread before bedtime because I’m excited to go out with my roommate or to go to yoga or whatever. Abbie: Like eventually I got to the point where success, I think I, I always was gonna like care about sleep, but I definitely got to the point where success was a lot more like. What is my mental state about sleep? Am I wrapped up in this like anxious bald spiral or am I thinking and doing other things with my day? Abbie: So yeah, I think measuring progress definitely changed. Does as time went on. And I do think measuring progress in did I sleep or did I not sleep is, was not useful for me personally. Martin: It makes sense why we would want to measure progress based on how we’re sleeping from night to night because that’s the main problem that we are looking to solve. Martin: And yet it can set us up for struggle ’cause our own experience probably tells us that sleep is out of our control. So I think it can be useful to dig a little bit deeper and ask ourselves. What makes sleep important to me? Why do I want to get rid of insomnia? Martin: And on the surface it can sound obvious, but if you do a little bit of digging, we can often find that it reveals bigger insights that are often more related to, we see this as an obstacle to us living the kind of life we want to live. We don’t have freedom over our lives or power over our lives anymore, and we want that back. Martin: And so when you uncover something along those lines, if that’s something that you do uncover. It can help you redirect your attention towards action. And maybe then your markers of progress become more related to action. And that can be so helpful because action is within your control. So if insomnia is an obstacle to you doing things that matter, or if you’ve started to do some things that matter, maybe then that’s the true progress. Martin: ’cause it’s actually moving you closer to where you want to be, rather than trying to eliminate something which you might not be able to direct your control. Abbie: Definitely true for me that one of the worries with insomnia was like, like I said I’m not gonna be able to go to work, I’m not gonna be able to be successful in a career or maintain my relationships, giving myself evidence that’s not true in the form of well, I’m gonna do these things anyway, was so powerful. Martin: It’s connected to that power and influence all these thoughts and these feelings that show up alongside insomnia have over your life. So you are able to reflect on the fact that they were almost certainly still showing up maybe less over time as you’re less tangled up in them. Martin: But I’m sure they would still show up because they’re natural, normal human feelings and thoughts, but they’re not consuming all of your energy and all of your attention. They’re more like water off of a duck’s back rather than some, rather than this huge pair of stadium speakers right in front of your face just blaring heavy metal music. Martin: They’re just starting to lose some of that power and influence. Abbie: Yeah, definitely. And it’s so interesting to reflect now when I have a period of sleeplessness or something like. Just how now it’s like an annoyance. I’m like that was annoying. I might be tired today. When before it was like, the world is ending, so I think the seriousness at which I view not sleeping has, is definitely definitely lessened, which is good Martin: When it shows up it’s more like a mosquito rather than a huge black bear frothing at the mouth. Abbie: Yeah. Martin: As you were making these changes, was it just a case that things just got progressively better? Martin: Or did you find there were periods when things went well and then there were like these road bumps or setbacks? Was there any kind of patterns you were noticing, or was it all over the place? What did that look like for you? What did that journey look like for you? Abbie: Yeah, definitely was not linear. Abbie: I think about maybe after about six months, I felt like I was sleeping okay, maybe six hours a night in my own bed. But I think sleeping elsewhere or having my partner stay over, traveling, all that stuff was like still really hard for me. And like on one pattern I noticed was like on Sunday nights I really had trouble sleeping because I was like, again, putting pressure, like this is my last night before I have an entire work week to get through. If I don’t sleep tonight, I’m gonna be tired all week. And then by the time like Thursday came, I think sleep was like a lot easier ’cause it just was like, okay, I’m at the end of the week. I’m tired. Abbie: But yeah, I would say it was probably about like a year until I felt like I could really sleep elsewhere, like travel or stay at my parents’ house or anything, and sleep. Abbie: There were definitely bumps along the road and about a year in I ended up going to grad school and that was just like a big change in my life and a period of kind of stress and some of the sleep issues came back and I just went right back to the things that I had worked last time. Abbie: Like I went back to my wake windows and I think it was just so much easier when it did come back because instead of thinking like I, I mean there were some thoughts of oh no, like it’s happening again. But more so there were thoughts of I did this before, I can do it again. And I have better tools now. Abbie: So I think looking back, it was like each bump along the road made things better in a way. ’cause it was like, again, more evidence that these things are gonna ebb and flow, but I’m always gonna return to baseline. Martin: You can’t have those bumps in the road unless you’re moving forward on your journey. Martin: And that’s something we can easily lose sight of. We focus on what hasn’t gone right or we focus on the setback but that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t within that context of some kind of progress. Abbie: Yeah, I definitely had a lot more gratitude, like going from sleeping one or two hours a night, like every next hour that I was able to sleep. Abbie: Like I was just grateful for. And even now if I consistently will get eight hours of sleep and every once in a while I’ll be like, I need to remember to be thankful for that because there was a period in which like four hours of sleep was like the ultimate goal. So yeah, definitely a good exercise in practicing gratitude too. Martin: I think when the difficult nights show up or when the nights when we get less sleep than usual or what we were hoping for, it’s a reminder that as human beings there are gonna be nights when we have less sleep than we want. Just there will be thoughts that show up and some of those thoughts will feel good, some won’t, some will be helpful, some won’t. Martin: And it really is just a case, like you said, of the ongoing practice. You’ve got that experience at that point of what has helped you. It’s just a case of going back to them or refocusing on them. Because every time you practice, you also get better at them. You gain more skill In all these things that we talked about, you develop more resiliency, you become better at it. Martin: But that doesn’t mean you can reach this ultimate peak of enlightenment when none of this stuff affects you and never shows up ever again. Life doesn’t work that way. There’s like this magnet force trying to draw us back into a struggle. But it’s a case of you’ve got that awareness now of when that’s happening, you know an alternative way to respond. Martin: And you can focus on those action based responses to continue moving forward. As you reflect on the journey that you’ve been on, how has it changed your life? What have you learned from this whole experience? Abbie: When it was happening I remember, like I said, just having these really negative thoughts of this is gonna change my life for the worst. Abbie: I’m gonna have long-term, health or otherwise consequences from this. And not only has that not been the case but also I feel like it, it really has had a positive impact in that. I just feel like a lot more equipped to handle. The ebbs and the flows. There was a point in my life where, you know, thinking about having kids and traveling and all these things that were gonna disrupt my sleep, like really stressed me out. Abbie: And those things are a little bit quieter now that I have this like trust that, that I can handle these things. And I think that extends not just to like insomnia, but other areas in my life like these thought patterns and this mentality like can be applied to any sort of like area of anxiety or just any sort of thoughts that I’m having. Abbie: Yeah, I’ve definitely found it just like mentality shift to be useful in other areas of my life as well. Martin: You’re not the first person to say that, and I completely agree with you. A lot of this stuff that we talk about can really powerfully impact our lives in a positive way. It’s not just a way to respond to insomnia. Martin: The experience can be a real growth opportunity, which sounds crazy when you’re still in the struggle with it, but once you’re able to reflect back on it, what you learn from the experience can be a huge asset. Abbie: Yeah, definitely. I think it, like you said, at the time I would’ve just like totally rolled my eyes that this is gonna be a positive thing in the long run. Okay, sure. But yeah it really has been. Given me a lot of coping skills I think that I can take into the future and into other areas of my life. Martin: Abbie, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening they feel as though they’ve tried everything. They’re beyond help. They’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia. What would you say to them? Abbie: I think first I would say you are not alone. And in the nicest way possible, like your anxiety and your insomnia is not special. I remember feeling like that’s great that all these people have found these solutions, but somehow my insomnia is worse and mine is different. Abbie: And these things like peace and returning to this baseline is not possible for me. And the funny thing is that’s what we’re all thinking. That our insomnia, our anxiety is somehow different and special. And yeah, just to say that, me overcoming this also isn’t special. Abbie: That is possible for everybody. And yeah the path might not be linear, but I think it’s possible for everybody and we can’t control sleep, like we’ve been saying. But you can control how you respond and I think that’s the best way forward. Martin: Thanks again for taking the time to come onto the podcast and to share your journey, your experience, all the insights you’ve picked up on the way. Abbie: Yeah. Thanks so much. It was great to talk. Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to get your life back from insomnia, I would love to help. You can learn more about the sleep coaching programs I offer at Insomnia Coach — and, if you have any questions, you can email me. Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Please share this episode!

Natasha’s insomnia journey began during the long grind of the pandemic. Life was full, intense, and stretched thin. She and her husband were working and their young son needed to take school classes online. When their nanny suddenly stopped coming, Natasha brushed it off at first. But that first sleepless night turned into another… and then another. Before she knew it, she was caught in a spiral she couldn’t make sense of. Like many people who’ve always slept well, she didn’t expect sleep to suddenly feel impossible. She tried going to bed earlier. She tried teas, essential oils, supplements, white noise, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication — anything she could find and all the things the internet tells you “should” help. Each attempt only made her more aware of how badly she wanted sleep and how far away it felt. Her nights became long stretches of alertness mixed with exhaustion — awake while everyone else slept — and her days were filled with worry about the next night. Over time, insomnia started to shape her choices. She avoided travel. She canceled early meetings. She relied on her husband sharing a bed with her for sleep to have any chance of happening. Insomnia slowly became the center of her days. The turning point didn’t come from a pill or a hack. It came when every one of her “solutions” stopped working — and she realized she couldn’t keep building her life around avoiding insomnia. That moment of exhaustion and honesty pushed her to look for a different approach. When we started working together, Natasha began noticing something important: even after a bad night, the next day could go better than she expected. And sometimes, after a good night, the day didn’t feel great at all. That simple observation helped loosen the grip insomnia had on her. She also began changing her actions in small, meaningful ways — not to fix sleep, but to take her life back. She scheduled breakfast meetings again. She made evening plans without checking the clock. She traveled. She stopped organizing her days around sleep anxiety. And she created a calmer routine at night by watching shows she enjoyed instead of lying in bed trying to force sleep. Today, Natasha has her life back. Sleep isn’t a project. Nights aren’t battles. Insomnia no longer runs her life. Natasha runs her own life and sleep takes care of itself. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin: Okay. Natasha, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Natasha: You are welcome, Martin. Thanks for having me. Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the very beginning. When did your sleep problems first begin and what do you feel caused those initial issues with sleep? Natasha: I think it was 2022 and we were still very much within the pandemic. And so there was of course like bad news all around, but I wasn’t necessarily stressed by that. All our children were outta school in the sense that all the schools were shut down. Natasha: At that point, my like 5-year-old or 6-year-old son, he was having to do his online classes and the day was just relentless, right? Because me, my husband, we were both working, we didn’t have any help at home. And then he had these online classes. So I had found this sort of nanny person who could help out during the day so that we could get our work done. Natasha: And I think she basically just called in sick. And I think like now, and this is all in hindsight, but I think it was some sort of like anxiety from that. And she wasn’t being very specific about whether she was, she had COVID or whether she was just, she said, I’ve hurt my foot. And, I think it was basically the fact that there was a lot of uncertainty about when she would be back and whether she would be back. Natasha: And I couldn’t sleep that night when she said, I’m not coming tomorrow. And, I think that was fine because the next day rolled around, but then the day after that, again, I sort of couldn’t fall back to sleep. And you know what happens when you haven’t slept one night and you feel like you have this huge day to get through the next day you try to overcompensate. Natasha: So I think I probably try to get into bed really early and I couldn’t fall asleep. And then I think I probably still just got out and read a book and got on with it. Natasha: So the days had been quite difficult to get through with a small child and work. I think by the third day I started noticing, I suddenly noticed the fact that I hadn’t slept very well and that I wasn’t being able to fall asleep. Natasha: And so the third night, I just really couldn’t sleep at all because I’d become very attentive to the fact that I was having this difficulty and that I had to. And so I think that’s what set it off. I don’t think there was anything more than that. Once it got started it just became this kind of vicious spiral of crashing pretty much after two or three days of sleeping very badly. Natasha: And then feeling slightly recovered the next day only to not be able to go back to sleep that night. And yeah, I think I started paying so much attention to the fact that I was having difficulty sleeping, that it was just getting harder and I think it, it turned into a huge full-blown problem. Martin: I’m gonna guess that there’s been other times in your life where you might have got a little bit less sleep or a lot less sleep than normal. And then things figured themselves out and sleep got back on track. What do you think was different this time around? Natasha: So I think a few things might have been different. Natasha: One was of course, that I think the pressure in the pandemic was very high on productivity and just somehow getting through the day. So not just, you had a lot of things to do at work. You had very little help and I had a child and I think also because there was this idea that there was some degree of latitude with your partners. Natasha: If for some reason you are sick, then he can pick up the slack more than what he’s normally doing. But I think he was completely slammed as well. As a family I think we’d become very aware of just how we were stretched beyond like capability. Natasha: So I think maybe that was one like predisposing condition that it, it made the need for rest so much higher. And therefore I think there was some kind of a, psychological reaction to the fact that when you thought that you really needed to rest, you weren’t being able to. I also do think, I do think it maybe had something to do with COVID because I did get COVID early 2022. Natasha: And I think I got, ever since then I’ve had COVID twice. And every time I’ve had COVID I’ve had a little bit of difficulty with sleep and a little bit of hyper arousal. So I, I think maybe it was a combination of these two things. But normally now if that happens, it just resolves itself because I don’t sit and, I don’t get too upset about it. Natasha: But at that time, perhaps, maybe some sort of like the physiological part was there, and then there was this huge psychological reality. Martin: Would you say that because it was such a stressful period it felt like maybe the stakes were higher than they were in the past. So as a result, you put more pressure on yourself to get sleep back on track. Martin: There was more trying, more effort, more pressure. Natasha: Yeah. I think there’s also one of the things I have realized and listening to your podcast, it’s something that I’ve observed. There are a lot of people who say that they develop insomnia. Many of them say that they were excellent sleepers. Natasha: They were brilliant sleepers before and they could sleep anywhere, anytime. And that was me as well. I could sleep anywhere, anytime. But the other thing is also that I think there are people who say that, I can’t function without sleep. I need my sleep. I love my sleep. Natasha: And there are others who are like, yeah, I can get on with it. It’s fine. I think you and I feel like if you’re the type who has told themselves for years that, oh, I can’t function without sleep, which is what I used to tell myself, and that’s why I used to sleep very adequately because I’d be like, oh, I need my nine hours and I need like my naps in between. Natasha: I feel like if you’ve spent years telling yourself that you can’t function without sleep and then a stressful situation comes that requires you to compromise with sleep or where your sleep gets affected, perhaps you are more susceptible to then developing anxiety around it, right? Because you’ve told yourself that you don’t know how to kind of function without it. Natasha: So maybe it’s also personality or like prior mindsets. Martin: It’s like the more important we deem something in our lives, quite naturally, the more we’re gonna focus on it. And if it deviates from whatever we want it to be doing that’s gonna immediately generate a lot of concern. Martin: And where we get trapped with insomnia and sleep is really, it’s beyond our direct and permanent control. So it, it kind of backfires, that additional effort. We might not be able to control the thoughts, we might not be able to change the fact that we see it as something important. Martin: It’s okay to see it as something important, but it’s our actions around that. The more we try to make sleep happen the more we can end up struggling with it. Natasha: Yeah, and I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that now there is so much literature and all the things you can do to improve your sleep, right? Natasha: So there is this perpetuation of this illusion that somehow sleep is something you can entirely control and engineer. And I think I was doing so much of that as well. Natasha: You go through this strange, five stages of grief or something through that period of night where, you just, at some point you’re very angry. At some point you’re very depressed with your situation because it’s also this, it is a strange experience of being wide awake when the whole world is sleeping. Natasha: It’s different from being a night owl and it’s different from someone who’s, voluntarily working or relaxing or gaming or whatever. Natasha: You are alert and exhausted. So because you’re alert, you can’t go to sleep and because you’re exhausted, you can’t actually do anything productive. So you’re literally just sitting awake and not being able to do anything and not being able to relax. Natasha: And I think that in that whole process you do end up, of course you start googling feverishly and I’ve done everything right. I think over the last two years, before, before I met you, I think I’ve done everything I must have done. Like the primrose oil, the lavender, the magnesium, the chamomile tea, the Yeah, like I think the white noise and I’ve done, I think you try everything and the more things you’re throwing at it, the worse it’s getting. Natasha: And I think every failure after you’ve tried something and that failure is even harder to reconcile. But some of that comes from the fact that you’re reaching out for answers into Google and Google is giving you some solutions. It’s not telling you that, the way to, to get to sleep is just to let it go. Natasha: It’s not telling you that, it’s actually telling you, do this, and then you start doing it. Martin: The information out there tends to be about doing more, it’s, if there’s a problem, do this. And with sleep, it’s all about doing less. If anyone has a recollection in their own experience of a time when sleep wasn’t an issue or a concern, what did you do to experience sleep in that way? Martin: And it was nothing. It was going to bed. It was getting out of bed, living your life, and it just took care of itself. But then we just exposed to this proliferation of advice and information and hacks and gadgets and gizmos and this and this. And when we are feeling stuck it’s completely understandable that we are gonna be looking for a solution. Martin: And almost everything in life, the solution is do this or do more, put more effort in. Try harder. That sleep is one of those outliers. And we can so easily through no fault of our own, get tangled up in that quick sound, so the more we fight it. The more we struggle with it, the more we try and escape that quick sound, the deeper we find ourselves sinking. Natasha: Yeah. You said this and I think I, this is printed in my brain because I remember in one of our first sessions you said exactly this, you said that most things in life respond well to effort, but sleep doesn’t, sleep does not respond well to effort. And because we all have such a bias for action and effort, you think that if there’s something I can do. Natasha: What happened to me was like one night I didn’t, I think again, my husband, I woke him up at 4:00 AM because I was like, I think I’m having a heart attack. Natasha: Because, ’cause you are just palpitating now obviously your body’s completely dysfunctioning because you’re exhausted and you haven’t slept. And so I was sweating and I was feeling this like pinch in my heart and he got really worried. Natasha: So I said, okay, let me just go and buy sleeping pills. And I didn’t know what that was. So I went to this pharmacy and I was like do you have sleeping pills? And they were like you need a prescription for that. Because in India you don’t need a prescription for a lot of things. A lot of things you get over the counter, but hang on, this one is one that we do need a prescription for. Natasha: So then I started texting you can only get prescriptions from, obviously a licensed doctor or a psychiatrist. And I didn’t know any, so I texted one, a friend saying, do you know? And then she said yes. And so she connected me with somebody. But they said that you have to, you have to have a session with a therapist. Natasha: For her to for them to evaluate you. And I was desperate, right? Because I hadn’t slept all night. And I said, listen, I just, I need something to knock me out and I don’t need therapy. I don’t need a therapist. I’m fine. Literally the only problem in my life right now is that for some reason I’ve developed this mysterious inability to sleep. Natasha: And, but they of course, had the responsible practice was that I should talk to a therapist. So I did. And of course, at the end of the hour she was very sweet and she said it does seem you are fairly self-aware and your relationship with your partner is very good and everything is fine and maybe you just need medication. Natasha: And I was almost like, yes, I told you so then she put me through a psychiatrist. And that person, but that was the interesting thing, right? When I went to the psychiatrist and it was, she spoke to me literally for 10 minutes, and this was on Zoom because we were still in the pandemic. Natasha: And yeah, she was like okay, are you anxious about something? And you, you mentioned one or two things because if you are living life and if you’re adulting, of course you’re anxious about a few things. So I said a few things and she was like, okay, great. And here’s an antidepressant, which kind of surprised me because I’d never taken antidepressants before. Natasha: And I have studied psychology, so I do understand SSRIs. So I asked her, I said, oh, why are you giving me an antidepressant? She was like basically this is, it’s just going to relax you. So I said, fine. Natasha: So I took that, but I wasn’t happy about it because I wasn’t happy taking it. And I think what also what happened was I started taking the antidepressant for a couple of weeks. And predictably. So I slept okay on the first couple of times because it was a sort of a placebo, right? You had this like safety feeling that I’m taking a pill and I’m fine. Natasha: And then I think I was traveling to Delhi for work and it, I had my pill and it didn’t work. And I was up all night and I had to work the entire day. And then the same thing happened the next day. I came back to the hotel, I was exhausted and I was like, I’m going to just absolutely crash. Natasha: I think I fell asleep in the cab on the way to the hotel, but I popped my pill. I got into bed and I couldn’t sleep. And then I was like, okay, this medicine is not working. So I remember being, that, that makes you really worried because you see, I went to a doctor gave me something and now this is not working. Natasha: So then I came back and then I tried different things. When I got back home, I remember that night I went to bed and my husband Suraj was sitting next to me, and that was very comforting. So then began this whole era of me saying, okay, I need you to sleep in the bed with me, right? Natasha: You have to be in bed with me. So whether you are reading or whatever you’re doing, you need to be in bed. Because I wasn’t sure the medication was working. And so I stopped taking that, but then I didn’t have any other crutch, so I said, okay, you have to be in bed with me. And so he would have to get into bed and sometimes he likes to sleep a bit later and I get tired sooner. Natasha: It was adding these layers of something is wrong with me to my sense of self, right? Because you’re like, first you can’t sleep, then you, now you need your husband to come and lie with you. And you’re affecting his life as a result. Natasha: And then I became very averse to traveling as a result. So I said, I don’t want to, I don’t wanna go anywhere because I I don’t know, I, I don’t wanna sleep alone, so I don’t wanna go on business trips and I don’t want to go, but more than business trips, because those couldn’t be avoided. Natasha: I was almost like, I don’t wanna go on personal instead of holidays with my girlfriends, and I just don’t wanna go on a holiday with somebody where if I’m not sure where I would have to sleep alone by myself. So I was supposed to go for this hike and we would go, we were gonna sleep in a dorm. And I was so terrified of the idea of being like, absolutely wide awake at 3:00 AM in a dormitory full of girls, I don’t know, which was not me at all. Natasha: ’cause that, that I was not that type of person ever. So I opted out of that. I said, no, I’m not gonna do that. And it just started adding up right where I stopped making evening plans because I said, oh, if it’s too late, and then I get home late and then it I won’t have enough time to wind down and get to bed. Natasha: So I think all of this was happening and even when I was traveling. In 2022, I remember we went for this, I had this huge event in September or so. And it had been like eight months since my issues with sleep. But I had to go to Bombay for this event for a whole week. And my plan was that I’m basically going to night cap it through I’m going to have a drink every night and then I’m going to somehow knock myself out and just get through the entire week. Natasha: And that’s exactly what I did. Which, in hindsight, that’s, it’s just such a terrible strategy. But there was no other way to imagine being able to do things like this. So I feel like this was carrying on and I had sort of, because I’d already been to a psychiatrist, one I once, I didn’t consider going back to anyone because what I was very aware of was that I really wasn’t struggling with anything in my life in a big way other than sleep, so I. And that was the other thing. ’cause again, anytime you ever told anyone or even hinted to somebody that you find it hard to sleep, the first question they’re like, oh, are you stressed out about something? Or or and that can almost start grating you. ’cause you’re like, no, I’m not stressed about anything. Natasha: I’m not stressed, I’m not per se stressed and I, but this thing that, you’re losing sleep because there must be some something underlying and something subconscious and you’re like, no. The only thing that’s conscious, subconscious and all pervasive is sleep anxiety. And I think the fact that sleep anxiety, again, is its own category of anxiety, of, it’s a type of anxiety that perhaps happens. Natasha: And there are no other underlying hidden, Freudian reasons for why you’re not being able to sleep. You’re really, you’re just having some, you’ve developed a strange relationship with sleep and your bed. So you are passing out on your couch and then the minute you hit the bed you are like wide awake, so I think this thing was something that I have only processed a little bit in hindsight and through, conversations with you and understanding this whole situation. But like throughout 2022, it was just, it was some, it was a hack, just hacking my way through it. And because things were working out really well with having my partner in bed with me I was like, okay, fine, this is fine. Natasha: How bad is it? And even through 23, I think like 23 actually was very stable because like I said, whenever I was traveling, I had become that person where I said, okay, I’m not gonna sleep when I travel. But even then, I think there was. There was a, I remember again, I went for a team retreat and I was up the entire night, like the sun came up and I just got outta bed and we all had, and this was this big strategy retreat, which you had to talk a lot of strategy. Natasha: And that was the, and I was confused about whether I should tell my teammates that I didn’t sleep all night. And so I, but I decided to, ’cause I said I can’t, I’d come to that point where I was like, this is just who I am. This is going to be forever. So I have to start telling people that I find it hard and I’m, I have lovely colleagues and they’re all wonderful people. Natasha: So I said, maybe I can trust them and I could just tell them that I couldn’t sleep all night, because, if I’m spacing out in the middle of the dates, it’s only fair that they know. And I did tell them and and they were very kind about it, but I think I was so tired. Natasha: At the end of that day, I remember, and I was so terrified, Martin, that I was not gonna be able to sleep again. And so I actually asked my one of my teammates who I’m really close with, and I really like her. And I told her, I said, and this is gonna sound very strange ’cause we were all living in a house. Natasha: So it was nice. It was like a large, huge villa. And I said, is it okay if I sleep with you? And she was like, yeah, sure. And she was very sweet about it. And so I actually had went and I slept in her room with her. And I think that there were parts of me that was so embarrassed by this, but also so helpless about it and feeling like what is happening. Natasha: Whenever you tell people they, I mean they are sympathetic, but either they don’t understand or it’s the sort of you’re stressed. Natasha: And again, I think I was talking to someone and they recommended the psychiatrist and this therapist to me. So then I went to her and she prescribed me a whole other set of SSRIs and anti-anxiety medication. And again, I took it for a while and it does make you feel slightly different. So I think I started feeling a little bit. Not okay on some of that medication. Natasha: Especially, I think the worst experience which I’ve had is taking medication, going to bed, not being able to sleep, and then you are waking up with half, slept with this half digested medicine in your brain and you’re just getting through the next day because you know you, ’cause you have to. Natasha: All of us end up going through all these rabbit holes because there is no direction and the experts are actually giving you wrong advice and Google is definitely leading you in the wrong direction. And then you’re just stuck with all of the, this sense of helplessness and this huge sense of the fact that something is broken inside you. Natasha: And it’s funny, because I do actually work in the mental health field and there is a lot that’s said about the stigma associated with depression, with anxiety because even though there has been so much awareness building and conversation still, if your team members or someone in your organization is going through depression and they’re not able to perform, very few people can actually come and say, this is what’s happening to me when it’s happening. Natasha: They can talk about it once they have figured it out and gotten over it. And in a strange way, like insomnia is like that because if I hadn’t slept all night and if I slept at 4:00 AM and I woke up at seven and I had a call at nine 30 in the morning and I had to cancel it, or I had a call at seven in the morning, which I had to cancel. Natasha: I couldn’t be like, I’m sorry, I have to cancel this call because I couldn’t sleep all night. I would say I’m sick, or something else. But it sounded absurd to see, it almost sounds like you’re not a, you’re not a capable functioning adult if you say oh, I couldn’t sleep. And I think that sense that something that everybody else is just doing so effortlessly and everybody else is just doing without thinking and you’re just not able to do. Natasha: And it’s so basic. It’s, I would look at my son he’d just pass out. It feels so basic. I think that was the hardest part, like now in hindsight, right? It was of course the tiredness and all of the other things. But this, the psychological experience of going through insomnia, I think is very difficult. Martin: I completely agree with you. Just the way you were describing it there, you could tell how insomnia or sleep just started to become more of your identity. It was almost like taking over more of who you are. And in a way you were just losing this independence, this independence, this sense of agency that you have over your own life, because so many of your actions became geared towards protecting sleep, avoiding insomnia compensating for difficult nights, all of which is completely understandable. Martin: And when all of that stuff just doesn’t feel like it’s proving to be a long-term solution, it can then feel really mysterious, right? Martin: It can feel like there’s something uniquely wrong. There’s something going on here that is different to what other people might be experiencing, and then we can get all of that kind of self-judgment and maybe some shame and some embarrassment and the negative self-talk, and we can be really harden ourselves that just piles it on and makes things even more difficult. Natasha: Yeah. I don’t wanna start like blaming, Google and blaming the sort of sleep culture, but I think the thing is that scientists the people who are closest to the science are the most humble about the conclusions. But the health industry is the exact opposite, right? There are just lots of claims and there’s lots of stuff. Natasha: And now the algorithms just push it to you because for sure at some point my algorithm figured out that I had, and probably very quickly that I was anxious about this. Natasha: So everything that I was being prompted. Was just like this about sleep and that about sleep and women in sleep and something and constantly actually the reverse, which was the extreme benefits. And so everything from like longevity to dementia to osteoporosis, every single thing is linked to sleep. Natasha: And of course it is, in the sense that, but it’s also linked to diet and it’s also linked to happiness and it’s also linked to genetics. And it’s linked to a hundred thousand things. Natasha: Once the algorithm finds you and finds your weakness, it starts then. And then I actually actively stopped looking at any of that content. ’cause I very quickly realized what it would do to me, right? In the sense that it would just make you feel even worse about where you were. And I think that, that’s one big part of sleep anxiety as well, because you are convinced that you are like hurting yourself. Natasha: You’re convinced that you’re becoming very unhealthy and that you’re going to die, because because you’re not being able to sleep well and that, your brain is going to deteriorate very quickly and everything is just gonna deteriorate. Natasha: I do know people who sleep badly and they run marathons and they just it doesn’t matter, like they just live their lives despite the fact that they sleep badly and they continue to sleep badly and they continue to live their lives. But I do think that there are others. And then me especially I was not being able to reconcile these two things, that I would not sleep well, but I would just get on with my life. I think the, the sense of the control and the pop science was also hurting quite a bit. Martin: When we have a problem, we wanna look for a solution, right? And there’s just so much out there. And I think there is also a lot of misinformation and misleading information out there because that’s what gets the attention. If someone writes an article that just said Sleep, it’s important, you can’t control it. Martin: No one’s gonna read that, right? But if someone comes up with a headline that says 12 Sleep Hacks that guarantee eight hours of sleep, or 12 things you can do tonight to prevent cancer ever showing up in your life, loads of people are gonna read that. Natasha: Over those two years I did lots, I accomplished lots. A huge part of life was continuing. Natasha: But the point was that I was not entirely myself and that’s the bit that I was missing. It had become a new mutation on my identity, the sleep thing, right? So 99% of my identity was still the same, but there was this new 1% that had just emerged from somewhere. Natasha: You’re not accepting your situation. You’re quite distressed by it. That’s another thing that comes with insomnia. Martin: It becomes more powerful the more we try to resist it. You can find yourself acting in ways that don’t really reflect who you are or who you want to be. Natasha: Actions are a powerful way to signal to your brain what, where your attitude lies, so I think that sometimes you can’t just intellectualize your way out of a problem. Natasha: Like sometimes you have to change the way you’re behaving. In that sense, this kind of almost subterranean signal to your brain that your attitude towards something has changed because now your body’s doing different things than what it was doing. Martin: You’d already tried so many things. You had a strategy, a roadmap that you were following with kind of mixed success. Martin: What made you think it would be productive or there would be an opportunity here for you to get something from us working together? Natasha: What happened in 2024, which is when we met, was that everything just started failing. And I don’t know why necessarily. I think we went on this holiday for New Years in 20 23 we went to this holiday. Natasha: And at that holiday, our entire day routine was starting very late. And we were not sleeping before 12 or 1230 every single night as a family. And I think because we’d lived that kind of routine for about two weeks, when we got back home early 24 I think I was like, I have to go to work, so I should get to bed at night. Natasha: And obviously your body was in attuned to sleeping at nine. And and then that, and this time I went to bed. My husband and I went to bed. He promptly fell asleep. I don’t know his bo his body can sleep as much anytime. I dunno, it just doesn’t seem to bother him. But I couldn’t. And then there was that like, oh shit moment, right? Natasha: That, oh my God, my last standing hack has stopped working. And there was all this legacy of failure as well in the past. And so then I think basically I went through a couple of weeks where I, it was exactly as bad as your peak struggles where you’re just not sleeping before you had figured out your placebo or your hack or your safety behavior before any of that, ’cause once I figured some of those out in 22 and 23, then there was a whole period of stability. But again, I was back in this tumult and we had to go for, to celebrate a function for the same sweet teammate of mine who had shared her hotel bed with me. And she, her sister was getting married and we went and we flew to another town for this. Natasha: And again, basically all of us landed. We got to the hotel really late. Everyone’s exhausted, husband and child pass out. I don’t sleep at all. At 5:00 AM I think he woke up to get a glass of water. And he saw, and I was reading and he said, oh, why are you up? And I said, I haven’t slept all night. And so I think for him, he was like, oh my God. Natasha: What is, this is bad. Because, I think he could really empathize saying You must be exhausted. And I was tired and I was just, I was so upset because I’d come for this wedding and I’d been really looking forward to it. And I didn’t feel like participating in anything because like literally my body, my brain, everything was hurting. Natasha: So he then said we should go to, he found some sleep clinic and we went there when we got back. When we got back home again, it was the same, it was the same thing. So again, I went to the sleep clinic, the doctor prescribed me some other, like tricylic or some other cocktail of drugs. And even as the doctor was talking, and this was like a neurologist who literally told me, and I have no issues saying that, this is what he said to me. Natasha: He was like, oh, that’s really strange. Oh, you should be able to sleep, but if you’re not, here are some pills. And if these don’t work then you’re going to be on sleeping pills your whole life. There’s no other solution. He said that. He was like, oh, come back to me in a month because if this doesn’t work, then, and he literally shook his head and said, oh, then there’s no hope. Natasha: And then you’re just gonna have to be having sleeping pills for the rest of your life. And even as he was seeing it, I think something in me just got really pissed off. I was like, this is ridiculous. He didn’t even listen to my story. Natasha: It was just like, oh, you have sleep problems? Okay, here you go, here’s some drugs. So as soon as we got home, I told Suraj, I was like I don’t think he, he doesn’t know what he is talking about at all. I have actually had this situation for the last two years and I don’t think he knows what he’s saying. Natasha: And Suraj of course, trying to be the very like, supportive person. He said no, you should not. Don’t reject the doctor’s thing, just take the medication. You will be fine. And sure as hell, it didn’t work. Like after three, four days it stopped working. Natasha: And then basically I think I, in one of my, fever dreams at 2:00 AM 3:00 AM like as I was awake I was just typing into Spotify ’cause I was listening to different podcasts to to keep myself entertained at night. Natasha: And I was like, oh, there must be some podcast. Somebody must have talked about insomnia. And I typed that into Spotify, and then I found your podcast, and then I started listening to it. And Martin, for me, I was so desperate by then, I was so tired and so desperate that I said that I won’t even bother listening to all these episodes. Natasha: And, piecing together the wisdom. I said, I’m just going to write to this person and I’m just gonna directly reach out to him. Because at that point, I was very sure that I really needed like somebody to work with me, somebody to talk to. I couldn’t do some sort of self-paced, self-help. I really had to feel like I had shared my side of the story with somebody and then they understood and then they were going to kinda help me. Natasha: So that’s how I actually, I found you. And that’s what brought me. So in some sense, it was the ultimate failure of everything that got me here. Martin: When we started working together what kinda concepts did we explore or what kind of changes did you make that were different, that you feel helped you move forward and start emerging from this struggle? Natasha: One of the things that I really appreciated was that you actually asked me to list out my own strengths, right? And I think when you did that, one of the things that you noted was the fact that I do actually lead with intellect to some extent. And so for me, being able to understand like psychologically and cognitively understand things. Natasha: And once I see them in a new light, I think that’s very powerful. So that was the first thing where I think I still, this was like, I still remember our first conversation right where you said that sleep doesn’t respond to effort. And that line, it just almost like immediately, I think I just completely changed my behavior almost immediately in response to that. Natasha: I remember you mentioned in the early days itself was the fact that you can sleep really badly so you can have a bad night, but you could have a good day and you can have a good night and you can have a bad day. And so I started attending to that. Natasha: And I actually started noticing that was true. Like I could have had a very bad night, but the next day many things went well. Many things went my way, and the day was pretty effortless, even if I was slightly tired and whatever. Natasha: And then there were other times where I’d slept perfectly well and I was like, whatever, restless or fidgety or the day had gone badly. And so this dissociation of sleep is this thing that, produces this perfect day for you the next day, and you are just like this perfect person the next day. Natasha: I think for me the dissociation of those two things was also very important from, again, a kind of intellectual lens. Natasha: And then of course there was the whole bit around how do you change your actions, right? What will you do differently? And why I mentioned these two reframing sort of points is that I think they help you take those actions because sometimes you can’t take an action without conviction. Natasha: If you’re not convinced or if you don’t understand why you’re taking the action may not yield very much, but if you do understand why you’re taking that action, it helps. Natasha: I was always so conscious about like setting up breakfast meetings. I would never set up breakfast meetings. I had stopped doing that ’cause I was like no. I don’t know. Natasha: I started setting up breakfast meetings. I started like setting up dinners. I said, that’s fine. I’ll deal with it like however it goes. Calendaring your life the way you would if you did not have any issues with sleep. There was perhaps something powerful about that. Martin: It sounds like in terms of that perspective, really when we were working together, it was just a process of teasing out what you already knew, what was already inside you. This idea that sleep doesn’t need or want or require all of these kind of efforts or attention or rules or rituals or accommodations, it just wants to take care of itself. Martin: And as we explored that, you were able to reflect on your own experience and you realized, huh, yeah, that is the case. Like my experience has been telling me that, but because I’ve, my superpower of problem solving is the dominant force right now that has almost been clouded in a way. And you got this pressure to continue trying to problem solve, continue putting effort in, even though the experience says that might not be useful for you. Martin: And then the second approach was the actions you started to chip away at that power and the influence that sleep was having by focusing more on actions that served you rather than serving insomnia. And as you did that it kinda lost some of its power and influence over you. Martin: So maybe in turn you might have been less inclined to put that effort in, and so it becomes a cycle again, but maybe a more positive cycle compared to before. Natasha: Yeah, very true. I also of course, owe a debt of gratitude to K-Dramas because I one of the things that we discussed and we talked about was also like, I think nighttime awakening is a very unpleasant experience, right? Natasha: And that’s the other thing that people who struggle with insomnia will talk about that. Just the experience of being awake at night is for some reason really unpleasant. But if you flip that and if you start looking at it as some sort of invitation to binge watch K-Dramas, and for me it was fine because you the day is very busy and you’re, you’ve got children, you’ve got work, and so you can’t exactly just watch silly television all the time. Natasha: So for me, I tried to, I started thinking that so I actually intentionally found certain series and. I said, okay, I’m gonna watch these at night and I’m not gonna watch them through the day or at any on the weekends. I’m not going to and I’m gonna watch this at night. And I, and the other thing I told myself was also this idea of, a little bit of like sleep consolidation, I think. Natasha: Which did help with the hyper arousal part because I think that’s so physiological. It had to be trained out. Was this fact that no matter what, I’m not gonna sleep before 1130 or 12 even, so I’d start watching like my TV at, nine 30 and then I almost used to feel, I was almost looking forward to the TV time. Natasha: ’cause I said I have two and a half hours to watch tv. I have so much like time, actually, I don’t have to turn it off. I could just watch the next episode and the next episode. Because, I’d get up and I’d make myself a beverage and I’d come back, I’d make myself a snack, so it became this I have this whole day, which is relentless, and then I have these three hours that are just mine. Natasha: So looking at it from that point of view did help because once I told myself that I’m not gonna try to sleep before 12 I think it helped because then, yeah, by the time it was 12, I was quite tired and I hadn’t spent two or three hours in bed trying to sleep, working myself up, on the kind of arousal lad because when you’re tossing and turning, you get kinda worked up in a way that’s very different from when you’re just watching like Korean tv and then you’re genuinely tired. Natasha: And then by 12, 12 30, I was so there were many nights where I started successfully falling asleep at the time that, I decided to fall asleep at, which was 12 or 1230. And I think that also helped quite a bit because this idea that your relationship, like I was saying, that relationship with your bed literally and your body’s own cues that, when it lies down, it starts to feel like this. Natasha: I think it suddenly started changing because of accepting the night. I am accepting the fact that the night is going to be long, and so why don’t you make it nice? Martin: Your relationship to being awake at night had changed through your actions. So even if sleep was exactly the same, in other words, you never fell asleep before, let’s say three o’clock in the morning. Martin: The difference is one time you might have been in bed tossing and turning, really struggling, battling away until three o’clock in the morning. This alternative approach involved watching some TV shows that you like doing stuff that’s more pleasant, setting aside time for yourself making it a more useful way to spend that time awake and that in turn. Martin: Although there’s obviously no guarantee that’s gonna make sleep happen because it’s out of your control. It just makes that time awake more pleasant. It doesn’t get you so exhausted and tangled up in that struggle. And it can also help train your brain that maybe being awake at night isn’t such a threat that we need to be on action stations to try and protect you against. Natasha: Exactly that. Martin: What would you say if someone is listening to this, and we’re talking about making being awake more pleasant, we’re talking about accepting that sleep might be out of your control, that the difficult thoughts and feelings might be out of your control. But someone’s listening to this and they’re thinking, I’m not interested in any of that. Martin: I just want to sleep. I don’t want to. Read a book or watch tv, I need to get rid of these thoughts and these feelings. I don’t wanna learn how to deal with them. I just wanna sleep. How do you respond to that? Natasha: I would say that’s a perfectly understandable reaction. So the first thing is that, that’s a completely understandable thing to feel when you’re going through this. Natasha: And I felt exactly that. I think I also had this, you have to go through your arc because you do go through this like resistance and anger and you feel very, yeah, you feel resentful at the fact that you’re being asked to accept something that you don’t like at all. Natasha: But, I think there is, again I think humans are very resilient in the way that at some point I think you realize that there is no choice. There is no option but to accept because not accepting this is not serving you very well. And so that was the other thing that I think this feeling that you should not be having negative emotions about insomnia. Natasha: That’s not true at all. Like of course you’re going to feel bad. Recovering from insomnia requires you to not think that sleep is important? No, it’s none of that. Because of course you, you’re not gonna think sleep is not important or you’re not gonna value sleep. Natasha: You do value it and it is important. And it is. It’s perfectly fine to exist in that contradiction of, knowing that this is important, wanting it, desiring it, but not becoming completely agitated. I think because that’s the really important part. How do you find routines and rituals, and how do you find maybe just the first level of acceptance. Natasha: That’ll help you feel a little less agitated. And then I think that, these are positively reinforcing loops because when you experience that slight, like release from not feeling very agitated, from that first level of acceptance, you accept a little further, and then you practice acceptance and it gets better and better. Natasha: And the funny thing is, it is true. There are times of course, and I am sure that many of your other like people might have said the same thing, but when you start sleeping better again, there’s a part of you that’s I should not be noticing this. I should not be noticing that I’m sleeping better, that this is working because I don’t wanna notice it. Natasha: A part of you is noticing the fact that, okay, I’m relaxing and I’m, I’ve let go. I’ve just let go now. So I’m gonna watch TV and I’m just gonna stay awake and I’m gonna embrace whatever this is. And then you’re like, and it tends to work. And the more you do that, the more it works, so I think it’s a com. It’s this whole like positive loop. Martin: All thoughts and all feelings are okay. So much of our struggle can come from this belief that we shouldn’t have certain thoughts or we shouldn’t have certain feelings, and that can just set us up for a struggle. Martin: The alternative way forward is to acknowledge all of our thoughts and our feelings as normal valid human. That as human beings we experience the full range. Some make us feel good, some don’t. Some are useful, some aren’t. Some are true, some maybe not. We have the power to decide how we choose to respond to them, and I think that’s really what you’ve encapsulated so well because it’s when we respond with resistance, which is completely understandable, it feeds into it and it gives that stuff more power and more influence, and it just gets as tangled up. Martin: If we’re feeling stuck, if things feel mysterious, perhaps there’s an opportunity here to respond in a different way with a little bit more acknowledgement, acceptance, and letting go, as you said, not holding this all so tightly just opening up to it a little bit more. Martin: If nothing else, perhaps that would just free up a little bit of energy and attention that otherwise would’ve been consumed by battle for you to do more of the stuff that really matters to you. Natasha: Yeah, and if anyone’s listening to this, I think they’re already halfway there in the sense that they have at least found something that’s giving them, that’s helping them square their own experience with some amount of knowledge. And at least, like I said, for me it was really helpful. Like the hardest part was all the misinformation, like when you are being, when you are consuming something that’s not actually helpful for insomnia and then, and so it’s either lack of information or it’s misinformation. Natasha: But I think once you get the right information, even if there’s resistance initially, resistance gets spent, eventually you are spent, right? Because how much are you gonna struggle? Because you will resist, and you will resist. And then eventually, if it’s not working, you will be tired and you will let your guard down. Natasha: And at that point, at least you’ve got the right information and you are ready to receive it. The problem is when there’s just no information and then you just continue in these loops of confusion. So I think for me, awareness generation is really important. Martin: I remember when we were working together, you had this concern about acceptance. How do we achieve acceptance without it feel like you are in a position of helplessness and you’re giving up, versus how do I achieve acceptance with a sense of power of individual empowerment? Martin: And that can be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, right? Natasha: It is. I remember writing to you and saying that I’m not feeling like I’m choosing acceptance. I’m being forced to accept, in which case it’s not acceptance, it’s just something that’s forced on you. Natasha: But the thing is, like I said, I think that resistance and that friction was required for me to get over the hump as well. And there are people who may perhaps come to acceptance easily and there are others who may not. And I think both reactions or like a whole spectrum of reactions is perfectly natural. Natasha: What I do feel is from my own journey also, is that eventually, like acceptance is inevitable because, the friction doesn’t yield anything that’s helpful in this situation. And so the only thing is that, like I said, having somebody to talk through on when you’re going through this, having someone to talk through with is important because, some of the words and the reframing and the perspectives, they’re there at least. Natasha: And it’s like when your acceptance portal finally opens. It’s available for that information to go inside. If there was nothing there, then you may accept it, but from a place of helplessness or sorrow or just, I don’t know. And then you would have to work a lot harder perhaps to generate solutions and kind of perspectives for yourself. Natasha: But if there is some perspective, initially the door is closed and it’s not going in, but that’s okay because at some point the door will open and then all of that stuff that’s waiting to be heard and understood will go inside. Martin: Yeah. There’s value in every part of the experience, even when it feels like we’re really struggling, there’s always something to be learned from that, and it might not feel like it’s useful at that time, but at some point in the future, we will serve some kind of value as a learning experience or something we can pick and choose from to help us move forward in a different way or to keep us moving forward in the way we want to be moving. Natasha: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Martin: What did progress look like for you on this journey? Did you find that as you were starting to get this sense of independence back, sleep just suddenly magically transformed and you were having great nights of sleep and every single night was better than the last? Natasha: I wish I could say that. There is no such thing as perfect sleep. And no one is sleeping perfectly. I mean, you may have less sleep for multiple reasons, right? You’re traveling and then there’s other disruptions and someone is sick and so on, so forth. Natasha: So I think, I think the important, the huge tangible change, I think and it’s not a change that, let’s say that if you just looked at the surface of my life in terms of like, how productive is she and how active is she? And how creative is she? I think a lot of that is probably looks the same because you are still doing things. Natasha: But I think what did change, one of the things that did change Yes, is that I think this idea of traveling definitely came back for me. Traveling for leisure. Not just work, but traveling for leisure. And so I did actually travel last year a couple of times for leisure. And so that was one small change. Natasha: Yeah, like having late nights and it’s totally fine having early mornings and it’s totally fine. And just so that sense of like release with your own. Calendar and not having anxiety about it, so I think for me, there are, of course, even today, there are several times where, you will get, six hours or five hours, because maybe you’re traveling. Natasha: But I’ve noticed that not only I don’t talk about it, like that’s the other thing, right? I don’t, I’m not talking about it with like my husband or my sister or anybody that, gosh, like I wouldn’t see that talk about it at all because I’m yeah, it’s fine, I’ll go to bed tonight and tomorrow or whatever. Natasha: And even if I’m, even if I’m like, I’ve got three straight like events and for some reason the three straight nights I’m going to be pulling like late nights, I’m okay. I’m not very stressed about that. So I think basically there’s a certain sense of relaxation and I will say that, look, this journey is not linear, right? Natasha: And I suppose like the longer you’ve struggled with it or the harder you’ve struggled with it, and the more intensely you have felt about it, like it is gonna take you some time to feel like this isn’t a theme in your life at all. And like for me, for instance, even like this showing up here to talk about it and to have it recorded, there was for a long time I thought that I wanted to write about it actually for last year, early last year, I started wanting to, when I experienced a lot of these benefits, I said I should write a whole piece. Natasha: And then I just couldn’t because I said that, I don’t want to jinx it. And so there were these lingering feelings, right? Saying that if I talk about it, if I, and if I go out and announce that I’m fine and I had this problem and I no longer have it I don’t wanna say that. But then, over time it just faded away. Natasha: Even that, even holding onto that kind of goes away. Time actions, consistency and of course this underlying reframing is the journey. It happens in fits and starts, but I think eventually you do get to a point where. Your relationship, like you said, the relationship with sleep changes. Natasha: One of the things I do appreciate about this journey has been that I have actually learned a lot about sleep. There is no perfect, there is no eight hour, eight and a half, seven or whatever. There is no, you have to find your rhythm and the more you dissociate with the sleep dogma that has become a culture I think the better off everyone is. Martin: In terms of the timeline here, how long would you say that it took you to get to a point where you felt like you’d left the struggle behind? Natasha: I think there was this whole period of, there, there was also like micro progress and then there was like a little bit of a slide back and there was frustrations. Like I said, it was non-linear. So I would say that it was probably only by the summer, so about maybe four months or so, four or five months. Natasha: And I did actually start scheduling like work trips and travel and so on so forth. And the more I did that, I think by the time summer rolled around, I was starting to feel like I could plan my days and plan my weeks and plan my time the way I wanted to. And yeah, and it’s been like a steady stabilization from that point all the way, till now. Natasha: I do wanna again stress that when somebody says that they no longer struggle with insomnia, it doesn’t mean that they sleep like nine hours or eight hours every single night consistently all the time. That is not the, that’s not what resolution looks like. Natasha: Resolution is you’re not controlled by it. Martin: It’s very rare that someone tells me that they’re able to change everything and transform their lives in a few days or a few weeks. And it often requires ongoing practice too, right? There’s ups and downs. Martin: We’re always gonna get pulled back into a struggle, whether it’s with sleep or insomnia or anything else that goes on in our lives. It’s just that awareness when that’s happening and being able to change course to refocus on actions that matter to us and to live our lives and allow sleep, the opportunity to take care of itself rather than trying to fix sleep so that we can live our lives. Martin: If we can just flip that around, it can just be such a transformative way of approaching this. Natasha: Yeah, I agree. Martin: Your whole learning experience, your whole journey maybe comes down to this realization through action that you have the ultimate power over your life. And as you reinforce that, sleep just becomes a thing. It doesn’t just, it doesn’t become the most important thing in your life when you are not resisting it so much when you’re just accepting sleep is gonna turn up and do whatever it wants or insomnia’s gonna turn up, do whatever it wants. Natasha: And you do start sleeping much better. I think the listeners especially need to hear that if they’re going through it right now, they don’t want to, feel like the takeaway of this is that, oh, you’re just gonna reach some radical acceptance, but your sleep is not gonna change. Natasha: The truth is that the sleep does change and you do feel rested and you do sleep more and you get back to sleeping normally. The idea is to just not expect that. That every, you’re going to be in some sleep paradise all the time because that’s just, that’s not even normal life, and I think by the time, if you’re going through a lot of insomnia, what you want is that you want sleep paradise. Natasha: You just want something where every day you’re just knocked out cold beautifully because you develop that kind of a, sensitivity to sleep. But once you get over it, you realize that most of the times you’re sleeping well, sometimes you’re not. And irrespective, it’s just not on your mind anymore. Martin: Natasha, I want to thank you for all the time you’ve taken to share your experience with us. I do have one last question for you. If someone is listening and they just feel like they cannot end the struggle with insomnia, that there’s nothing they can do, what would you say to them? Natasha: The first thing I would really say is that it’s understandable to feel that. And it’s hard. It’s very hard feeling that, it’s a really hard place to be in when you are feeling like that. But I would say that there are many people now who have figured out how to come out of this. Natasha: It’s not a pharmacological technical solution, it’s something that’s inside you, everybody has it. Your sleep is not broken. Your brain is not broken. Like nothing about you is broken. It’s a phase and I think like everything this will pass and some of just a little bit of intentionality and just to some amount of, perhaps, hopefully perspective and reframing and then just changing your actions a little bit and a combination of all of that and patience will get you through it, so I think that’s probably what I’d like, anybody listening who’s struggling to take away. Martin: Thank you so much again for coming on. Natasha: Yeah. Martin, thank you so much. Thank you for what you do. Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to get your life back from insomnia, I would love to help. You can learn more about the sleep coaching programs I offer at Insomnia Coach — and, if you have any questions, you can email me. Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you are not alone and you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Please share this episode!

Dan had never struggled with sleep — until a stressful period in late 2023 turned his nights upside down. After a panic attack and a couple of sleepless nights, he found himself pacing the house at 2 a.m., clock-watching, and convinced he was broken. Even after medication gave him one long night of sleep, the struggle came roaring back the very next evening. As a highly-skilled problem solver, Dan threw himself into fixing insomnia. He followed strict routines, taped over every bit of light in his room, tried teas and supplements, and skipped work after difficult nights. Yet the harder he tried, the worse things got. Every attempt to control sleep just added more fear, more pressure, and more exhaustion. Things began to shift when Dan stopped trying to control sleep and fight every thought. He started making small, practical changes: limiting nighttime clock-checks, going to bed later at night when he felt sleepy rather than tired, and committing to one meaningful activity each day — even after rough nights. Those actions reminded him that life didn’t have to stop because of insomnia. Over time, Dan learned to respond differently to the thoughts and feelings that used to overwhelm him. He discovered he could notice them without needing to believe them, and he didn’t have to beat himself up when sleep didn’t go the way he wanted. With patience and practice, nights became less of a battle, and his confidence in his body’s natural ability to sleep began to return. Today, Dan isn’t just sleeping better — he feels stronger than before insomnia began. He knows he isn’t broken, he has skills he can always rely on, and he’s living more fully, no matter what his nights bring. His story is a powerful reminder that with time, self-kindness, and small daily steps, it’s possible to stop struggling and regain trust in your natural ability to sleep.

Kelly’s struggle with insomnia began after the birth of her first child. What started as one sleepless night quickly grew into panic-filled evenings and anxious days. The harder she tried to make sleep happen — through medication, supplements, holistic remedies, and strict routines — the more elusive it became. Sleep turned into an obsession, and every decision seemed controlled by fear of another difficult night. Things began to shift when Kelly discovered that her body wasn’t broken — it was the exhausting fight with insomnia that was fueling her struggle. She started to let go of rituals, loosen her grip, and give herself permission to live more freely. At first she worried that these changes might just be more sleep efforts in disguise. But with reflection, she realized the difference was in her intention: instead of chasing sleep, her actions were now serving her life. Kelly also transformed her relationship with thoughts. Rather than identifying with them or trying to push them away, she learned to notice them as experiences she couldn’t control — stories and sensations that didn’t have to dictate her choices. With less resistance, they lost their power. When she became pregnant again, insomnia returned. But this time, Kelly approached it differently. Instead of getting pulled back into an endless and exhausting battle, she leaned into acceptance. She reminded herself there was nothing she could do to force sleep, and gave herself permission to rest, watch a show, or simply allow the night to unfold. Slowly, the fear eased, her days opened up again, and sleep returned on its own terms. Today, Kelly no longer measures progress by hours of sleep, but by how little influence sleep has over her life. She’s free to live her life — and sleep takes care of itself. Sleep is, once again, effortless.

During a trip to Switzerland, Stephanie had a night of no sleep and spent the next day battling panic attacks. Her sleep soon recovered, but that experience planted a seed of fear — a fear of going through another day like that if sleep didn't show up. Months later, when a medical diagnosis and abrupt medication changes disrupted her sleep, that old fear returned — stronger, louder, and harder to ignore. She threw everything at the problem: strict sleep hygiene, medications, rigid rules, new routines. But the harder she fought for sleep, the more relentless the struggle became. Some nights she found herself outside at 3am, wrapped in a blanket, scrolling for answers — exhausted, anxious, and desperate for relief. The turning point didn’t come from a new trick or another pill. It came when she stopped fighting. When she stopped treating wakefulness as a threat and gave herself permission to feel what was already there — the fear, the frustration, the anxiety — without trying to push it away. In this episode, Stephanie shares how letting go of the fight helped her start showing up for her life again. She talks about responding to difficult nights with more presence, more compassion, and more trust in her ability to cope — and how she rebuilt her life one night, one breath, one value-based action at a time. Stephanie’s story is a powerful reminder that recovering from insomnia isn’t about winning the fight. It’s about realizing there was never a fight to win in the first place.

Laura never expected insomnia to arrive during one of the happiest times in her life. She had just gotten engaged. She was heading out on vacation. But one sleepless night quietly snowballed into many — and nights quickly became something she feared. She tried everything: supplements, routines, medication, strict sleep hygiene. But nothing seemed to work. The harder she tried to fix sleep, the more distant it became. And eventually, she realized the struggle wasn’t just with sleep — it was with her thoughts and feelings about sleep. She found herself caught in a loop: trying to control, reason with, avoid, or edit every uncomfortable thought. Every wave of fear or frustration. And it was exhausting. The real shift came when she began to relate to insomnia differently — not as a problem to defeat, but as an experience to meet with less resistance. She practiced making space for the thoughts and feelings that showed up, and bringing her attention back to actions that helped her live the life she wanted to live. It wasn’t a straight path. There were setbacks. Relapses. Hard nights that tested her resolve. But each time, there was something to learn. Because while change is hard — not changing can be even harder. And Laura kept going. With persistence. With compassion. With honesty. With courage. Today, she still has the occasional tough night — like all of us do. But those nights have lost all the power and influence they once had over her. She knows how to move forward, independently of sleep, and no matter what thoughts and feelings might be present. This is Laura’s story.

Rebecca never struggled with sleep — until she began working 24-hour shifts as a hospital-based midwife. She cared deeply about her patients, and she made a quiet promise to herself: nothing would go wrong on her watch. That meant staying awake through every shift. Over time, that vigilance seeped into her nights at home. Sleep became something she chased — and then something she feared. Rebecca tried everything: medication, strict CBT-I programs, endless data tracking, a long list of rules. And still, sleep didn’t come. She followed every instruction, but nothing seemed to work — and somewhere along the way, she started to believe that something was wrong with her. That she wasn't doing something right. What changed wasn’t a new pill or a stricter plan. It was her relationship with sleep — and with herself. She began practicing a different approach. She gave herself permission to rest without sleep. To play golf. To laugh with friends. To live with uncertainty and discomfort instead of fighting them. She made room for the thoughts and feelings that once overwhelmed her — and realized they didn’t have to control her life. Sleep didn’t return overnight. But as her days became fuller and her nights gentler, it began to come back — naturally, and with far less struggle. Today, Rebecca still has shorter nights from time to time, as all human beings do. And they no longer define her or limit her. Because she knows: she can still live fully and move forward — no matter what the night brings.

Rupsa never had issues with sleep until a big change in her professional life led her to move to a new city. As sleep became difficult, she experienced a lot of anxiety. Her heart would race. She started to develop a fear of going to bed at night. She'd spend four or five hours awake in bed, hoping to fall asleep. Working with a psychologist provided Rupsa with some clarity and her sleep got slightly better for a couple of months. However, when she started a new job, insomnia returned with a vengeance. The more she tried to make sleep happen, the more difficult and exhausting it became. Everything was going well in Rupsa's life apart from sleep. It felt as though her mind was working against her. The more she tried to silence her mind, the louder and more distracting it became. The more she tried to make sleep happen the more of a struggle it became. Things started to change when Rupsa realized that trying to fight or avoid uncomfortable or difficult thoughts and feelings was consuming her energy and attention and pulling her away from the life she wanted to live. So, she started trying to be more open to whatever showed up. As she did this, she found her thoughts and feelings often contained important information. Reminders of what mattered to her. With this, she discovered that her mind was never working against her. It was actually working for her. Rupsa stopped trying to control sleep. She practiced bringing her focus and attention back to the present whenever it drifted away. She was kinder to herself. She became more accepting of whatever her mind might do and whatever each night might bring. With this, a burden was lifted — and, with going practice, things started to get better. Rupsa now sleeps well and, when the occasional night of less sleep shows up, it no longer has any power or influence over her.

Tim’s insomnia began during a stressful time in his life. At first, it was just a few bad nights but the more he worried about it, the worse it got. The harder he tried to fix his sleep, the more he struggled. Things started to change when Tim learned a new way to deal with insomnia. He realized that trying to control sleep was actually keeping him stuck. So, instead of resisting wakefulness, he began to give it permission to exist. As he stopped following strict sleep rules and gave himself more freedom, Tim learned that being awake at night wasn’t the real problem — it was his response to the fear of not sleeping that made things harder. Over time, as Tim let go of the struggle, sleep showed up all by itself, without him needing to go to war with insomnia night after night. And, when he stopped chasing after sleep and focused on living his life independently of sleep, insomnia lost the stranglehold it once had over his life.

Although Sophie never considered herself to be a good sleeper, things got really difficult after the birth of her son. As a new mom, she knew there would be some short-term sleep disruption — but when she was no longer able to compensate for lost sleep after her parents left and her partner returned to work, things got really difficult. Sophie's doctor prescribed her medication and she found herself increasing the dosage to make sleep happen but it wasn't working for her. Benadryl didn't work. Turning off all screens two hours before bedtime didn't work. Wearing blue light blocking glasses didn't work. Having a relaxation routine didn't work. At this point, Sophie felt desperate. She wanted to have a bigger family but thought that would be impossible if her sleep didn't improve. She was no longer sharing a bed with her partner even though that was something that was important to her. She felt like a failure. She felt trapped. When she found the Insomnia Coach podcast, Sophie realized that she wasn't alone and that there was a way out of the struggle. She started implementing a sleep window and she used the time she spent awake at night to do meaningful projects such as creating a baby photo book, rather than tossing and turning and battling away trying to make sleep happen. Things improved for a few months until insomnia returned and seemed to take over her life. At this point, Sophie decided to work with me. She wanted a clear plan. A new way forward. She wanted to arm herself with skills that would help her get her life back from insomnia. Sophie shifted the focus of her attention away from trying to make a certain amount or type of sleep happen and toward actions that reflected her values and that kept her moving toward the life she wanted to live, independently of sleep. As she did this, she realized just how capable she was. She could get stuff done — stuff that mattered to her — regardless of how she slept. This left her feeling empowered and reduced the power and influence sleep had over her life. She no longer put as much pressure on herself to make sleep happen. This, in turn, helped sleep become increasingly effortless. The difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with insomnia also started to lose their power and influence as Sophie became more aware of the power she had in choosing how to respond to them. Sophie experienced ups and downs on her journey. And yet, she remained committed to the new way forward she had chosen for herself. Sleep no longer predetermines how she will feel the next day or what she will do the next day. She knows she always has options and is always in control of the choices she makes. She's back to sharing a bed with her partner. She is ready to grow her family. She is free from the insomnia struggle.

In 2019 Danny was going through a stressful period in his life while also being on a big health and fitness kick. When his sleep started to become a problem, Danny became very concerned and his doctor offered medication. When Danny started to make some lifestyle changes to reduce stress, reduce the intensity of his training, and ensure he was eating sufficiently, his sleep started to improve. Danny felt relief, believing that he'd found the cure — that sleep needed a certain amount of exercise or a certain type of diet to happen. As time went on, Danny found himself increasingly focused on protecting his sleep through diet and exercise. This, in turn, created a lot of sleep-related anxiety — and when really difficult nights returned in 2022, Danny realized that diet and exercise weren't the guardians of his sleep after all. Looking for answers, Danny spent his days troubleshooting and trying to figure out a way forward. Danny discovered that the key to getting his sleep back on track was to reduce the power and influence sleep had over his life. For sleep to be effortless, he needed to move away from putting effort into making a certain amount or type of sleep happen. In this episode, Danny describes the approach he took. It involved committing to actions that mattered to him each day (no matter how small), independently of sleep. It involved identifying and eliminating sleep-related rules and rituals. It involved ensuring his actions served him rather than insomnia. It involved acknowledging all the difficult thoughts and feelings that came with insomnia and being kinder to himself when things were difficult rather than trying to fight or avoid them and being harder on himself. This process wasn't easy. It took commitment, resilience, and effort. It requires ongoing practice. Today, Danny's sleep is back on track. And, when the occasional difficult night shows up, it no longer has any power or influence over him or the life he wants to live.

When Esther tried moving away from a medication she was taking for generalized anxiety disorder, she found herself struggling with sleep. She would often wake with a jolt and experience panic and anxiety. Even when new medications helped with other issues, sleep continued to be a challenge and created a lot of ongoing anxiety. Esther did a lot to try to get her sleep back on track. She tried going to bed earlier. She tried CBD oil. She tried supplements. She tried to tire herself out through exercise. None of those things got her closer to where she wanted to be. Esther was determined to get to the root of the problem, which seemed to be all the difficult thoughts and feelings associated with insomnia. On her way to work one day, Esther came across the Insomnia Coach podcast and listening to the stories of people who had overcome their struggle with insomnia motivated her to start working with me. In this episode, Esther reflects on the changes she made that proved to be most helpful for her. They included going to bed later at night, doing something more pleasant whenever she found herself struggling during the night, continuing to do things that mattered to her even after difficult nights, and acknowledging her thoughts and feelings and refocusing on the present moment (rather than focusing on trying to fight or avoid difficult thoughts and feelings). Esther also shares some of the key educational insights that helped her reduce the amount of pressure she was putting on herself to make sleep happen. Her superpowers of self-awareness and self-reflection also revealed that the difficult thoughts and feelings she had been trying so hard to fight or avoid often came with the same physical sensations associated with more pleasant thoughts, feelings, and experiences. As she committed to a new approach, Esther realized she had new options available to her when it came to responding to insomnia. Options that wouldn't create more struggle, consume more energy, put more focus on sleep, and keep her trapped in the vicious cycle of more trying and more difficulty. Esther became less fearful about the possibility of insomnia showing up. She became more comfortable in its presence. Insomnia lost the power and influence it once had over her.

Irina's struggle with insomnia began when she experienced a night of no sleep. This created fear and confusion and Irina worried that something serious was going on — that something might be broken in her brain. The more she tried to make sleep happen, the more pressure she put on herself to make sleep happen, the more elusive it became. Irina tried medication but that left her feeling unrefreshed and didn't deal with the hyperarousal and increasing levels of anxiety she was experiencing. Turning to cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), Irina found sleep restriction helpful in the short-term because it helped her rediscover the reassuring sensation of sleepiness rather than fatigue and exhaustion. Unfortunately, the CBT-I technique of stimulus control which involves leaving the bed when awake at night backfired because she was someone who loved spending time in bed — so getting up felt like a punishment and something that raised the stakes at night. She ended up putting more pressure on herself to make sleep happen and that, in turn, made things more difficult. The turning point came when Irina committed to an approach that didn't involve actions geared toward trying to make sleep happen. Although she was originally outraged at the idea of accepting the presence of insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, the fact that so many people who had recovered from insomnia were telling her it was the only thing that worked for them led her to commit to this new approach. Acceptance was not easy but ongoing practice helped Irina build skill in experiencing insomnia with less struggle. She became less attached to the idea that she needed to make a certain amount or type of sleep happen. She became more comfortable experiencing difficult thoughts and feelings. The focus of her attention expanded and, as that happened, the power and influence of sleep and insomnia shrunk. Irina let go. She allowed the full range of human thoughts and feelings to come and go as they chose. She gave sleep the opportunity to take care of itself while she took care of doing things that helped her live the life she wanted to live. And, that's exactly what happened.

Neseret's experience with insomnia began when she tried tapering off an antidepressant she had been taking for 13 years. Every time she tried to get off the medication she found herself unable to sleep. Although a move from shift work to regular daytime hours and being more active during the day helped to improve Neseret's energy levels, she still couldn't make the final leap to being medication free because she was petrified of going without sleep. Finding Insomnia Coach and the stories shared on the podcast gave Neseret a newfound confidence that she could taper off the medication. She had hope. Neseret began a supervised medical taper while practicing new skills and habits that helped her move away from struggling with sleep and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with insomnia. She stopped putting pressure on herself to generate a certain amount of sleep. Whenever she found herself struggling during the night, she would engage in another activity so she had an alternative to struggle. She stopped trying to control sleep. Neseret's journey was not easy. There were ups and downs. There were setbacks. And yet, today, she is off the medication and sleep is no longer a problem or an obstacle to her ability to live the life she wants to live.

Neseret's experience with insomnia began when she tried tapering off an antidepressant she had been taking for 13 years. Every time she tried to get off the medication she found herself unable to sleep. Although a move from shift work to regular daytime hours and being more active during the day helped to improve Neseret's energy levels, she still couldn't make the final leap to being medication free because she was petrified of going without sleep. Finding Insomnia Coach and the stories shared on the podcast gave Neseret a newfound confidence that she could taper off the medication. She had hope. Neseret began a supervised medical taper while practicing new skills and habits that helped her move away from struggling with sleep and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with insomnia. She stopped putting pressure on herself to generate a certain amount of sleep. Whenever she found herself struggling during the night, she would engage in another activity so she had an alternative to struggle. She stopped trying to control sleep. Neseret's journey was not easy. There were ups and downs. There were setbacks. And yet, today, she is off the medication and sleep is no longer a problem or an obstacle to her ability to live the life she wants to live.

When Bryan got sick he experienced an entire night of no sleep for the first time in his life. He didn't sleep the next night, either. When his sleep didn't get back on track, Bryan started to believe that he had lost the ability to sleep and that belief generated a lot of anxiety. As sleep consumed more and more of his energy and attention, Bryan started to withdraw from life. His relationships suffered as sleep became the center of his universe. Bryan found that the more he tried to make sleep happen, the more difficult sleep became, the more anxiety he experienced, the more likely he was to engage in actions that didn't reflect who he was or who he wanted to be, and the more difficult everything became. And yet, as a driven problem-solver, he continued to try. Things began to change for Bryan when he accidentally fell asleep. When he fell asleep even though he didn't do anything to make sleep happen. There was no trying. No effort. No rules. No rituals. No medication. No supplements. Bryan realized that he hadn't lost the ability to sleep after all — and that he didn't need to do anything to make sleep happen. This insight didn't get rid of Bryan's struggles overnight but it prompted him to change his approach. He started acting in ways that served him and the life he wanted to live, rather than sleep. When difficult nights showed up, he would remind himself of the better nights (and how they required no effort or intervention). Then, he would refocus his attention on what he could control by doing things that mattered to him — actions that kept him moving toward the life he wanted to live, independently of sleep. With this approach, sleep started to lose the power and influence it once had over his life. In Bryan's own words, as he started getting his life back to normal, his sleep started getting back to normal, too.

Emily's insomnia struggle began around four months after the birth of her baby. Even though her daughter was sleeping well, Emily was finding it really difficult to fall asleep. She started to get nervous and anxious as her level of exhaustion intensified. When the medication prescribed by her doctor didn't work, Emily started to get really concerned. She started researching solutions but found that the more she tried to fix her sleep, the more difficult it became and the more stressful things got. Emily's anxiety intensified to the point where the arrival of bedtime would lead to a racing heart and a sense of panic. It felt like her body was preparing for a marathon while she wanted to get a good night of sleep so she could be the mother she wanted to be for her daughter. Emily's transformation began when she changed her approach to sleep and her response to insomnia. She reduced the amount of time she allotted for sleep to more closely match the amount of sleep she was getting on an average night. She started to do something more pleasant whenever she found herself struggling with being awake at night. She stopped calculating the amount of sleep she was getting each night and she began to look at sleep with less judgement and more neutrality. Instead of trying to fight or avoid her racing heart and the anxiety, she surrendered to them — she acknowledged their presence and allowed them to exist. And, she committed to doing things that mattered, even after difficult nights and even when she felt exhausted. Emily surrendered to whatever might happen each night — and this freed her from the pressure she was putting on herself to generate a certain amount or type of sleep and allowed her to move away from the struggle that came from trying to control her thoughts and feelings. Today, Emily goes to bed sometime around 11 at night and wakes naturally around seven in the morning. Sleep is no longer a concern or a focus. Her focus now is on living the life she wants to live.

Kirstin began using medication every now and then to help her sleep on Sunday nights. When she faced a big personal challenge that made sleep more difficult, she started to use it more often. The plan was to take a small dose to get her through that difficult period and then stop the medication because she didn't want to be reliant on something to help her fall asleep. Unfortunately Kirstin found that when she tried to stop taking the medication, sleep didn't happen. She went without sleep for three or four days straight before reaching for the medication in a desperate attempt to make sleep happen. Kirstin developed the belief that she couldn't sleep without medication and this created a lot of panic, distress, and confusion. Kirstin became obsessed with sleep. All she could think about was insomnia. Her days were filled with researching sleep remedies and experimenting with sleep-related rules and rituals. Nothing worked. Kirstin tried to stop herself from thinking about insomnia. That didn't work either. As nighttime approached she would get extremely nervous, scared, and upset. People tried to be supportive but nobody understood what she was going through. Things changed when Kirstin came across the Insomnia Coach podcast and realized that she wasn't alone. As she listened to the stories of others, insomnia started to feel less mysterious. At this point, Kirstin started to reclaim her life from insomnia. She made and followed through on daytime plans, regardless of how she slept. She prepared for difficult nights in advance so she had alternatives to struggling and battling all night long. She abandoned all her sleep efforts, rules, and rituals. She allowed all the difficult thoughts and feelings she was experiencing to exist — she acknowledged them and allowed them to come and go as they pleased. She practiced being kinder to herself. Kirstin's journey was not easy. She experienced ups and downs. When things felt difficult she made the conscious effort to focus on actions that would keep her moving toward the life she wanted to live and the relationship with sleep she wanted to have. Kirstin is also applying many of the skills she gained from her experience with insomnia to other parts of her life. And, she is sleeping without medication.

When Summer experienced consecutive nights of insomnia, sleep started to consume her life. She started taking time off work and she began endlessly researching sleep. Summer felt that if she could get rid of anxiety and stress things would improve — but this led to even more of a struggle as Summer went to war with her mind. Sleep became an obsession. It was all she could think about. Summer felt as though she was losing control. She felt helpless. She started to blame herself. It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to live the life she wanted to live. The more Summer tried to fix her sleep, the more she seemed to struggle. Sleep-related rules and rituals didn't work. Changing her diet didn't work. Changing the temperature in her room didn't work. Trying to eliminate blue light didn't work. Ultimately, what worked for Summer was not trying. She realized that she couldn't control sleep. And, by no longer trying to make sleep happen, she started to struggle less with sleep and she had more energy to live the life she wanted to live. Summer also started to be kinder to herself. She stopped trying to fight or avoid the thoughts her mind would generate as it did its job of looking out for her. She acknowledged her thoughts and feelings and allowed them to come and go. She expanded the focus of her attention. She spent more time with friends. She lived by her values. Summer stopped trying to control sleep and she stopped trying to control her thoughts and feelings. As a result, sleep no longer controls Summer's life. Thoughts and feelings no longer control Summer's life. Summer controls her own life.

Nina typically dealt with occasional periods of sleep disruption by taking some form of over-the-counter medication. When she fell pregnant this was no longer an option. Work stress seemed to make sleep more difficult and so Nina stopped taking on work. Her sleep would improve but every time she started working again, she struggled with sleep all over again. At this point, Nina thought her ongoing struggle with sleep might be down to pregnancy hormones and yet, after giving birth, her sleep seemed to get even worse. Nina tried to make sleep happen by consuming alcohol, taking supplements, and meditating. She tried hypnosis. Her doctor prescribed her medication but the side-effects were awful. Nothing worked and Nina felt stuck, she felt scared, and she didn't know what to do. Then, Nina found the Insomnia Coach podcast. She realized she wasn't alone. That there was hope. When we started working together, Nina started to make changes. She started to do things that mattered each day, even after difficult nights and even when that felt really difficult. Instead of struggling with being awake during the night, she planned and engaged in activities that would help make being awake feel a bit more productive or a bit more pleasant. Nina gave herself permission to be awake. She was kinder to herself when things felt difficult. She stopped trying to get a certain amount or type of sleep. She focused on actions that would help her get her life back from insomnia rather than continuing to battle with insomnia. Nina's journey was not easy. There were setbacks. She went back to sleeping pills from time to time. Today, Nina is back at work. She enjoys her bed again. She is being the mother she wants to be. She has her life back from insomnia.

Kreuza shares her journey through the challenging landscape of insomnia and somniphobia, a fear of sleep. Initially, she found Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) techniques helpful. However, when sleep problems returned as somniphobia, the same techniques faltered. Feeling isolated in her struggle, Kreuza realized that implementing rules around sleep were not helping her. A turning point came when she embraced a more flexible, compassionate approach to sleep. She began to practice accepting her thoughts and feelings without resistance. She practiced being kind to herself when things felt really difficult. And she engaged in activities that mattered to her, even after difficult nights. Kreuza’s story is a testament to the possibility and power of patient and kind practice of acceptance as a way to deal with deep-seated fears. It also highlights that moving past sleep struggles is often a journey of ongoing action and practice — and setbacks — rather than quick fixes.

Rachel’s struggle with insomnia started in grad school. She tried everything from sleep aids to strict bedtime rules and routines to improve her sleep, but nothing worked. The harder she tried to fix her sleep and get rid of sleep-related anxiety, the more difficult things became. The turning point came when Rachel changed her approach. She stopped focusing on trying to create the perfect conditions for sleep and she stopped trying to control her thoughts and feelings. She started being kinder to herself. She practiced making space for difficult thoughts and feelings and she practiced building skill in bringing herself back to the present moment and being more aware of the present whenever her mind started to time travel. Rachel’s story is a powerful example of how changing our approach to sleep and our response to insomnia can lead not only to significant improvements in our sleep, but also our overall quality of life. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin: Okay. Rachel, thank you so much for taking the time to come onto the podcast. Rachel: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Martin. Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s just start right at the beginning without any further ado. Um, can you tell us a little bit about when your sleep problems first began and if there are any clues as to what may have caused those initial issues with sleep. Rachel: Yeah, um, well, my first like where my mind first goes is. To my back to my first year of grad school, um, where like, at least one night a week, I felt it felt like I wasn’t sleeping at all. Um, and I would get really anxious about sleep, but I think that that was partly like being in grad school and feeling stressed about grad school. Rachel: Um, and also, like, I had a shift shift. That ended late and so like the process of of unwinding and then having to be at work early the next day. Um, and the feeling would be anxiety about sleeping like, yes, there were things in my life that were stressing me out, but I think it was like the anxiety would be I’m anxious that I won’t be able to sleep. Rachel: Um, and that that was well, that was long before. Before I reached out to you. But that, I think, is like the, I’m sure the sleep difficulties go back further than that, but that was like the first moment I can sort of remember. Martin: Yeah, and roughly how long ago was that when you, uh, that kind of grad school period of your life? Rachel: That was almost ten years ago. Martin: And so what was your sleep like at that time? You mentioned there was a lot of anxiety about, is sleep going to happen? What’s sleep going to be like? What’s that going to mean if I have difficult nights or all those kind of thoughts? I think lots of people listening to this are going to identify with. Martin: Um, how did that reflect in your sleep? Was it difficulty just falling asleep or was it just really interrupted sleep? What was there? Was there kind of like an average night? What was it like? Yeah, Rachel: um, I, I think it was mostly getting to sleep, like, it would be from the very, like, I would feel really hopeful about the night, about like whatever, new homeopathic thing I had taken on or tried and then, like, thank you. Rachel: Just the torture of being in bed and not falling asleep. And then periodically it would be like I would wake up in the middle of the night and like feel sleepy and groggy and then like not be able to get back to sleep. Hmm. Martin: Yeah. And, and how about your days? Were you finding the, all this difficult stuff that you were experiencing at night? Martin: Was, were you finding the days more difficult too? Rachel: Oh, yeah. I, I mean. I’m sure we’ll get into it like around the time I reached out to you, but I can just like feel in my eyes, like, cause I would take, a sleep aid of some kind, either like something prescribed or something natural and like, I wouldn’t have slept through that. Rachel: So then I felt groggy and just like almost that the ways your eyes can feel so tired that they hurt. Um, yeah, and just like down. Martin: Yeah, absolutely. And so you mentioned the medication, whether it was homeopathic or over the counter or anything like that. Um, will you find in the They were proving to be helpful at night time, but then maybe giving you those some side effects during the day, or were you finding that they probably weren’t even really helping at night and they were giving you the side effects? Martin: Like, what was that experience like? Rachel: Yeah. Well, I remember in grad school, I like tried all these like natural things like magnesium, like whatever that calm stuff is. Um. And like, sleepy time tea, and, uh, lavender on my feet, um, or like Tylenol PM, um, and then around the time I reached out to you, then I was trying, like, Ativan, Rachel: uh, Trazodone, marijuana, um, and what I found was that especially Around the time I reached out to you, those things would work the first time I used them, and I’d be like, great, I found a nice thing to use as needed. But then the second time I used them, my anxiety would keep me up through them. So It would be either like I had taken it and it worked, and then I was feeling groggy the next day, but then what really what it became was I would take it and my anxiety would keep me up through it, and then I would be like, have that hangover from whatever I had taken, plus not having slept. Martin: Yeah, I think a lot of people listening to this are gonna really identify with that, um, that kind of process of trying different things. Um, and. Sometimes they, they work like straight away, you can find the, Oh, this is it. I found it. I found it. Everything is now fixed. I’m back on track. Um, and then a difficult night shows up, whether it’s the next night or in a few weeks or a few months, and then it. Martin: It brings back all of those kind of anxieties show up again, right? Because it’s now it’s like, ah, now this doesn’t work. So something must be wrong. There must be something unique, uniquely broken or got something’s gone wayward here. I’m a unique case because none of this stuff is working. Now I have to try this new search and then it, the cycle just kind of repeats and repeats, right? Martin: It was, it sounds like that was, that was your experience. Rachel: Oh, yeah, it really was. And my friends, like, anyone, any roommates I’ve had, like, know that, like, I was so rigid about my bedtime. Like, we’d be in the middle of a conversation and I would, like, just abruptly leave because it’s like, well, I have to, like, start getting ready to bed in order to, like, attempt to control for this night. Rachel: Um, so yeah, it was just, like, lots of, like, stress and anxiety about, like, Wanting to control my sleep. Martin: Yeah, and like, like I always try and say, it’s completely understandable why we go that route. Because when, when something’s broken or when we identify a problem, we want to fix it. Right? And so many of the problems or obstacles in our lives. Martin: So if we want a new career, then we might retrain and that takes a lot of effort, but we go through it and then we have that opportunity. Right? But sleep is one of these sleep and what we think and feel. I think of these outliers, the stuff that happens. Inside us, like under our skin, inside our bodies that we can’t directly or permanently control. Martin: Um, and there, there are some things that we can do that probably can be helpful temporarily. Like if we drink, I don’t know, like a bottle of vodka, for example, before we go to bed, yeah, we’re going to probably be unconscious after that. Um, the, the argument is, is that sleep or is it something else? Martin: But that’s, that’s probably a discussion for, for another day. Um, what happens is all of these things are temporary, right? They just they’re not really. Dealing with the root cause of the issue, so when it comes back, when all this stuff that we can’t directly control comes back, then we’re, we’re just repeating that process. Martin: It’s almost like being stuck in the quicksand that we’re just struggling and struggling and struggling and just, maybe, maybe we’re either not moving or we’re just slowly sinking. We can feel really stuck and that’s when it can be a good opportunity to explore a new option or a new approach. Rachel: Yes. No, that definitely resonates. Martin: And I think, I think something that you touched upon as well, um, which is really, really common when we’re trying to fix, fix this problem is, Implementing those kind of rules and rituals around sleep in an attempt to control it, or to protect it, or to create the most perfect conditions possible for sleep to happen, is, they can come with some costs, right, in terms of not Like you said that you might be hanging out with friends, socializing with friends, but then, you’re checking the time. Martin: Oh, I need to be back. I need to be back to prepare for sleep, make sure that all the conditions are good. So we end up getting pulled away from the life we want to live, which in itself can make things more difficult. And then we’re doing that in the pursuit of something that we can’t really directly or permanently control. Martin: And the more we try, the more we can struggle. So then we’ve got the struggle, the difficulty with sleep, the struggle, the difficulty with anxiety, and we’ve also got the struggle and difficulty that comes with doing less of the stuff that matters to us. And that’s where it can just become so, so, so difficult. Rachel: Yes. This is sort of tangentially related, but I was just remembering, um, from like this time in grad school up until us working together. So it was like five to seven years. Every night I would listen to this podcast called Sleep by Mary Phelan. It was like a seven to ten minute sleep podcast, but I would have to start it over like four to seven times. Rachel: Like compulsively, um, not like just because I would get so anxious that like to make things just right to be able to fall asleep. Martin: Yeah, and it’s, I mean, you’ve been in this experience yourself, so it’d be interesting to hear your thoughts on this. But I think what we can have This source of anxiety, right? Martin: So let’s say sleep. So I’m, I’m naturally worried about, am I going to sleep tonight? Is tonight going to be really difficult? And that generates some anxiety, which is completely normal, completely natural. And sometimes I think what can happen is we can, because that anxiety doesn’t feel good, because we recognize it, we, we see it as an obstacle, as a barrier. Martin: Whenever that anxiety is there, I’m not going to be able to sleep. So I have to get rid of the anxiety. Then we can develop anxiety about anxiety. So now we’re not just dealing with anxiety about sleep, but we’re also dealing with anxiety about anxiety itself. Was, was that, does that kind of relate to your own experience? Rachel: Oh yes. Yeah. Like, I mean, this feels related, but Again, when I reached out to you, I had entered a new relationship and my poor sleep was, in my mind at the time, only when I was sharing a bed. But then what was happening was, it wasn’t just when I was sharing a bed, it was like bleeding into like, More and more nights of the week, but like the anxiety, like I, especially in on the nights or the days that I knew I’d be sharing a bed with my partner, I would just start, like, that would, sleeping would be on my mind from the time I woke up, like, of like, well, what will later look like? Rachel: What can I do to make later right? Like, just already feeling Anticipating the night time and like attempting, working really hard to be present, not thinking about my anxiety. Martin: Yeah. And how successful do you, now you’re able to look back, how successful do you feel that you were on being able to not think about certain things or not experience certain thoughts and feelings? Rachel: Uh, not successful! Martin: It’s really difficult, isn’t it? And I think there are some things we can do, maybe like going back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, that can help temporarily. Maybe we can distract ourselves and that might work. Maybe for a few minutes or maybe a little bit longer. Martin: But when it comes to thoughts and feelings, that’s what the brain does, right? There would be no brain without thoughts and feelings. That’s what the brain does. It’s just generating them all the time. And if we try to fight that or try to avoid it, Um, it takes, it takes a lot of effort, I think, first and foremost, takes a lot of mental energy, which can in itself be exhausting and create so much fatigue and what often happens because our brain’s number one job is to look out for us when it’s generating difficult thoughts and feelings. Martin: It’s because it’s trying to tell us something and when we try and fight or avoid that. Then the brain can get really concerned that it’s giving us these really important messages. But instead of listening, we’re trying to get rid of them. Then the brain can panic a little bit, freak out, and generate even more intense thoughts and feelings. Martin: And then we’re trying to push back again, and then it’s freaking out more and generating really intense thoughts and feelings to try and get us to listen. And it can just, we just get caught in that battle, right? Bit of China. Trying to control our minds or trying to control our thoughts and feelings and over the long term, it just again, where are we? Martin: We’re back in that quicksand. Rachel: Right. Rachel: I think for so long I had existed with like these very rigid sleep preparation, like rituals. And, and if I didn’t get to do that, then I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep in my mind. Rachel: And I think I like started to loosen the grip on that of like, okay, if I don’t have like the exact. 45 to 60 minutes I want. That doesn’t mean I won’t fall asleep. It just means I don’t have that time right now. Martin: Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting with those rules and rituals. We can implement the really rigid rules and regulations that we can implement because we We can be struggling, right, with sleep, and so we implement all these rituals or rules to protect sleep, to create the most perfect conditions possible for sleep, and yet we still find ourselves struggling, so I think there’s this little voice in the back of our minds that Might every now and then be saying to us is, is this really helpful? Martin: Is this really proving to be effective and useful? But at the same time, there’s probably another little voice that’s saying, well, yeah, we’re still really struggling. But what if we didn’t have these rules and regulations? Then things might be even more difficult. Um, how do you, how do you reconcile those two voices and take that leap into Moving away from all that pressure you might be putting on yourself with these strict rules and regulations, all the ways they might be pulling you away from the kind of life you want to live, and take that leap into Moving away from them being a little bit more flexible, living life a little bit more independently of sleep. Martin: Is it just a case of just going for it? Is it a case of thinking of it as an experiment? Like, how do you make that leap almost into the unknown, which can be quite scary? Rachel: Yeah, well, I, I, it was so helpful to have you as a coach and resource like because I think You know, I had tried consuming, like, my own self education and I was just too anxious to take it in because of exactly what you’re saying of like, intellectually, I understand that this works. Rachel: But it doesn’t make sense to me. And what if it’s wrong? Like, just like giving up my way of doing things that clearly hadn’t been working, but I just felt really scared. And so I think it felt so helpful, like, as I was going along, to be able to take my worries to you and, like, help debunk them. Rachel: Or like take the, what, because if you’re struggling with insomnia, like all these small things feel like, they start to become so big of like, what if I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Like, should I just ignore that? Or should I, like, should I push through and just try and fall back to sleep? Rachel: Or should I get up? Like, that, like, question that feels so small, as it pertains to, like, sleeping, would, like, cause me so much anxiety and being able to, like, take that to you and Have you be like, no, like just, it’s okay, like, like the soothing presence really helped me, I think, like release the rules I had or like the myths I had about sleep. Martin: I think an important point you made there or a useful point that people will probably identify with is We can, we can have this idea in place that there’s maybe what I’m doing isn’t proven to be workable or effective or helpful. We might discover that there’s a different way to do this stuff. Martin: And when we read about it, for example, it can sound pretty straightforward. Let’s say, for example, let’s try going to bed later at night instead of earlier at night. Which. Can sound a little bit confusing, a little bit scary, but at the same time when it’s explained, it can also sound quite logical because the later we stay up at night, the more sleep drive we can build. Martin: So the more likely, the better conditions are for sleep to happen. But I think it’s another thing to Take that and convert into action because it can be quite scary to take on this whole new approach. Um, because we might deal with thoughts like, well, what if this doesn’t work? Um, what if it makes things more difficult? Martin: What if this is the last option available to me? It doesn’t work. And then I’ve got nothing else left to try. The brain can come up with all these different scary thoughts and feelings. So having that support, whether it’s from a coach or maybe a partner or a friend, um, can be, can be so helpful because this is really difficult and it’s hard to do difficult things alone as an individual. Rachel: It really is. Yeah, I, like, I couldn’t get over just how. Much peace of mind it gave me to be able to get your feedback, to send you my questions, like, yeah, like, I think having some kind of buddy to do this hard thing with, I mean, for me, felt really essential because, like, the, because, I had bought books or was, like, starting to, like, like, look for things on the internet, but, yeah, the anxiety was too high just by myself. Martin: Do you feel that you maybe got a little bit more comfortable with the idea of night time wakefulness either happening or being a possibility? Martin: So instead of all your actions being centered around trying to avoid nighttime wakefulness or trying to get rid of it when it showed up, you started to feel a little bit more comfortable with the appearance of wakefulness or the possibility that it could exist. And that in turn maybe in itself created better conditions for sleep to happen. Rachel: Definitely. Yeah. Like I think I, I remember, um, I remember it was falling asleep. If there was any interruption in my insomnia days to my falling asleep, I thought I was Screwed for the night of like, oh, I was like being low to sleep. I was just about to fall asleep. And then something startled me awake or I started myself awake. Rachel: Um, and then felt like the night was lost. And then like, in the middle of the night feeling like if I woke up, that was a symbol of, something bad having happened in terms of like, in terms of sleep. Um, but I think in like, with the education you provided of like that, those are normal things. Like those happen to people that’s, that is within normal limits that does not preclude you from sleep. Martin: Something a little bit related to what you just said, um, about, something might wake you, suddenly wake you up, or you might jerk awake, um, and then you feel like the night was lost, um, was related to nighttime noise, when we started working together, you mentioned that, There was maybe this kind of fixation, maybe bordering on an obsession with trying to eliminate all potential noises that might happen through the night, and if any noises did show up, that was it, the night was a disaster. Martin: How, how, how did you end up dealing with that issue? Was it a similar kind of process or did that, was there a kind of different approach there? Rachel: Yeah, that’s so interesting, because, yeah, I just imagine like any roommate I’ve ever had listening to this and being like, yeah, she’s like, such a stickler about noise and like all these things, but like, it’s become so much less of an issue. Rachel: I think, um, I think in like both like in the understanding I was developing about how sleep worked, I think I developed like was also developing new ways of focusing my attention and like I’ll still do this as a way to relax of like going in between like an unpleasant stimuli and a more neutral stimuli. Rachel: So like if there’s noise and it’s Disruptive or unpleasant like I’ll alternate between that and like maybe like the sensation of my hands like it just it doesn’t feel as much of an emergency, like maybe it’s still something I would prefer wasn’t there is unpleasant, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going to ruin my night. Martin: That’s that’s really interesting. It sounds. It sounds a little bit like. You found a way to experience a noise, the appearance of a noise, maybe with a little bit less resistance, so you’re exposing yourself to maybe, Being more of an observer of that noise for a little while and bringing your attention back into your body, then observing the noise for a little bit and bringing your attention back to your body compared to all those thoughts and feelings are turning up about the noise and then you’re trying to suppress those thoughts and feelings, getting really mad about the fact there’s noise there and engaging in that battle in the middle of the night with all of this stuff that you can’t directly control. Rachel: Exactly. Yeah, like, oh, I remember just feeling so much resentment and like, like quicksand, that quicksand feeling whenever there was noise out of my control. And of course, not that that doesn’t still sometimes come up, but it’s just. It’s just not what takes up as much of attention, or as much of my attention. Martin: Yeah, I think that’s the key word, is how much of your attention it can consume. Because I’m trying to think of an analogy here. It would probably be something like, let’s say you’re lying on the beach, um, you’re listening to the waves and the birds and all that good stuff and then this family next to you pitches up a tent and they’ve got a Boombox, and then they start putting on the worst music imaginable. Martin: Um, then what’s going to naturally happen is all your attention is going to gravitate towards that really annoying, horrendous music and how you wish you couldn’t hear it, how you wish it would just go away. Um, And when, when that is the focus of our attention, so now we’re just intently listening to this music, even though we hate it, we miss out on everything else, right? Martin: Now we can no longer hear the, hear the, hear the birds. We can no longer hear the ocean. We’re no longer aware of the fact that it’s a beautiful day, that the sun is beating down on our bodies, that we’ve got a nice cold drink in our hands. 100 percent of our attention is this music. is really annoying. Martin: And I think it’s a process, right? It’s a process of bringing our attention back. Like you just touched upon when you heard noises at night, you’d listen to it, accept its presence, even though you wish it wasn’t there and refocus your attention. And then you’d probably find that your mind drifted back to that noise again, or your attention will go back to the noise and you would just gently bring it back. Martin: And it is a process because the mind is always going to want to focus on Obstacles, discomfort, um, problems, and it’s just a case of when that’s not helpful and that’s not useful, just refocusing our attention. Um, how was that for an analogy? I just made it from the top of my head. Do you feel like that’s what it’s like? Rachel: A hundred percent. Yeah. Like, I often have that thought of like, maybe I’m sitting next to a trash can and the sight of it is unpleasant, but if I just, like, shift my posture to look the other way, it’s like there’s a beautiful tree. It’s like, it’s not that it’s not there, it’s just that, like, I can, I can know it’s there and, like, look elsewhere. Martin: Yeah, exactly. So that’s a really important point too, because we’re not trying to trick ourselves that this stuff isn’t here because it is here and it does exist, but it’s just a case of kind of opening ourselves up to everything else that’s present other than that thing, other than the trash can, other than the boom box, other than all that unpleasant disruptive noise. Martin: And when something becomes less of a focus of our attention, obviously it consumes less of our attention, um, and it can feel like it’s less of a problem, because it’s not consuming 100 percent of our attention anymore, so therefore it doesn’t feel like it’s 100 percent of the problem. Rachel: Exactly, yeah, and it’s even, it’s just helped, because I even just like last week had One night where I didn’t sleep so well because I have a new roommate and I’m just like adjusting to her rhythms and I, I think it, I like was able to offer some soothing of like, your attention is here because this is new. Rachel: Like, like this isn’t necessarily like a permanent state. Martin: I think that’s a, that’s a really big insight too because whenever there is anything new. Um, the mind is going to be more aware of it, maybe focus on it a little bit more, monitor it a little bit more. And I think that also connects into these, these changes that we can make to. move away from really rigid rules and rituals and stuff like that when we do make a change, it’s going to be natural that at first the mind is going to be more focused on that, more aware of it, monitoring for the outcome, is this change instead of going to bed, for example, at nine o’clock at night and going to bed at midnight, the brain’s going to be more alert, right? Martin: Is this helping? Is this going to do the trick? Um, what’s what’s going on here? Should we really do this? No, let’s go back. Let’s go to bed early. Let’s go to bed now. No, let’s go bed later. That’s all natural and normal, right? And that’s when we can also, maybe we’re more likely to get. Pulled back into the struggle again, trying to either get rid of those thoughts or going back to old behaviors that we know from experience aren’t workable, aren’t helpful, aren’t effective. Martin: Um, and so I think it’s just something to be mindful of that anytime we do make a change or experience something new, there’s going to be more attention put on that. Right. And I think maybe what can be helpful is Trying to approach that from the mindset of being like a curious observer, like maybe being like a little bit of this kind of crazy scientist while I’m trying this new thing, or this new thing is showing up. Martin: Let’s just see how that pans out. So instead of just having that initial resistance to it, because we wish it wasn’t there or it’s difficult, maybe we can become more of an observer of it. Um, and when we become more of an observer, I think that we naturally become a little bit less inclined to struggle with it. Martin: To start battling with all that difficult stuff. Rachel: Right. Right. Exactly. Martin: So I think maybe something that’s a little bit related to this, is that when we have that kind of anxiety around sleep, um, It’s not only something that affects the nights, like you touched on earlier, it also affects the days, we find ourselves thinking a lot about sleep. Martin: Maybe that anxiety about sleep shows up during the daytime as well, and we can develop this preoccupation, right? It’s almost like we’re trying to focus on something. Um, but our mind keeps pulling us away and time traveling off into the future, what’s tonight going to bring, or maybe it time travels off into the past, what was last night like, it was really difficult, I feel really bad today, lots of difficult stuff like that, and I think one, another one of your goals was to explore, is there a way of moving away from this preoccupation with sleep so that maybe it consumes less of my attention, um, so I can do more of the stuff that matters to me without it getting in the way? Martin: How do you feel that you were able to move away from that preoccupation with sleep? Rachel: I think a big thing I remember when I was like, my sleep was really bad, right before I reached out to you, or in the midst of, like, our work, is that I could have good days, even when I hadn’t slept. Rachel: And I could have bad days even when I had slept that like feeling like there was so much anxiety like if I don’t sleep, then I’m gonna have a bad day. And it’s like, well, maybe, um, but also I’ve had plenty of bad days when I have slept and like have had low energy when I’ve slept it like you know it’s just like your energy is, it’s not so much something I think I’ve seen for myself that it’s like I can control. Rachel: That those, like, energy, my energy levels will just fluctuate no matter what, and so I think, like, Loosening the grip of, like, uh, if I don’t sleep tonight, tomorrow will be, like, I’ll be so tired, or it’ll be a bad day. Like, just being able to reality test that a little bit, and, like, I, uh, yeah, like, helping, with the idea that, like, um, like, a bad night’s sleep didn’t mean, like, That everything had gone to hell, and if I did have a bad night of sleep, like I would get myself a nice coffee in the morning just like to cheer myself up. Um, I think all of that helped to, to not feel like, like sleep was. Directing the outcome of my day. Martin: Yeah. Absolutely. And so I think that it’s really helpful to emphasize that really difficult nights can definitely make the days a lot more difficult, right? Martin: We probably would never have worked together if there was no kind of consequence to how you felt during the day. And at the same time, um, there’s also the fact remains that even after a great night of sleep, we can still have. difficult days. So there’s a relationship there for sure, but a difficult night doesn’t have to guarantee that every second of the following day is going to be truly awful. Martin: Um, and I think going back to what you were saying earlier about when you were refocusing your attention. And why I think that can be so helpful is when our days are really difficult and the mind does start to think and become preoccupied with, the burning eyes, the fatigue, the difficulty concentrating, it consumes all of our attention and it becomes Even more difficult for us to notice anything else that might be going on or to recall anything else that might have happened to us. Martin: Um, that was maybe a little bit more positive or a little bit more pleasant. So we, by refocusing our attention also during the day. It can also be helpful too, because it can just help us notice that even when things are really difficult, there maybe are a couple of glimpses of better stuff that are happening during the day. Martin: And often when we’re really struggling, we can miss that stuff. And it can really make it feel as though every second of every day is just a living nightmare. Um, and it can be really difficult. But, and at the same time, there might be Those little glimpses of good stuff that might go, get missed if we’re not engaged in that process of refocusing our attention to. Rachel: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like that, like, a conversation with a close friend could like, and going to like my favorite yoga class, like all those things can, are still beautiful things that I like got to experience. In that day. Martin: Yeah. And I think that’s somewhere where we can sometimes also get pulled back into that quicksand again, right? Martin: Is when we’ve, we just feel truly awful. Especially when we first get out of bed in the morning, which is often the most difficult part of the day. Um, and that can just lead us to withdrawing from all of that stuff. Like stuff that would be important to us. Stuff that keeps us moving toward the kind of life we want to live. Martin: So we do less of that stuff, which in itself, um, might make the day more difficult because we’re doing less of what matters to us. And it gives us less opportunity to refocus our attention. Because when we’re doing less, what’s the mind gonna do? The mind is a little bit more idle. So it’s just gonna internalize and just start time traveling again. Martin: It’s going to start coming up with all those difficult thought, those difficult thoughts, those difficult stories, and it’s going to emphasize all that difficult stuff because it has nothing else to focus on. Rachel: Right, right. Martin: So something that you talked about I think when we, right at the start of this conversation was When we identify kind of anxiety as this kind of barrier to sleep, I need to get rid of anxiety. Martin: Otherwise, sleep just isn’t going to happen. And I think A really big insight that you uncovered when we were working together was you found that there were nights when anxiety showed up and you were feeling really unconfident, you just did not have any confidence that sleep would happen. Martin: There was the anxiety was present and then you still ended up actually having. A good night or a decent night of sleep. Yeah. What did you learn from that experience and how do you feel that might have helped you? Rachel: Oh, yeah, I, that’s so interesting. Like, yeah, because I think it comes, it goes back to, for me, like, Formally having the feeling that the conditions had to be perfect to sleep. And so if I had anxiety then, That was like then the state I was going to be in, um, and, uh, yeah, I think, I think it was a lot of the education about sleep of like that, that the, the one thing, but especially if you’ve built up, um, your, your sleepiness, like if you’ve been awake throughout the day, that the, uh, That the only thing in between you and sleep was fear, like, anxiety. Rachel: And I think, knowing that, I could sometimes, like, recount that to myself. And that would help me relax. Or, like, partly knowing that a bad night of sleep, especially with these, like, behavioral measures in place. wasn’t gonna then ruin me for the rest of the week. It would be a bad night. Martin: Yeah. Yeah. I think sometimes it can also be helpful when, if we ever have an experience like that, it can maybe sometimes serve as a good reminder that Maybe in an ideal world, we could permanently delete anxiety from our brains before we go to bed. Martin: But if it does show up, it doesn’t have to guarantee that the whole night is written off and it’s going to be absolutely terrible. That it is possible to still sleep when anxiety shows up. And maybe what makes Falling asleep or falling back to sleep more difficult is when we engage in a battle with that anxiety when we try and fight it and we try and push it away. Martin: Maybe it’s that struggle that makes sleep more difficult compared to just the presence of anxiety alone. Do you feel that, do you feel like that was reflective of your own, your own experience? Rachel: Yeah, and I was, I was just having a memory to like, I think in. Time after we, soon after we were done working together, like, because for me, I think as soon as I feel any constriction in my chest as a sign of anxiety, that makes me, that used to be like a symbol of like, oh, no, there’s like a really bad night ahead because like the constriction has entered my chest. Rachel: There’s no making that go away. And I think it’s, it was a lot of, like, what we’re describing of my attention of, like, alternating between that and something more pleasant, that or something more neutral, and, like, being like, that’s there, but, like, yeah, like, refocusing my attention from it. Martin: And I think something else that is useful to just consider or, even better if you can pick it up from your own experience is that thing about sleep confidence. It’s great. It’s a great thing to have, but it’s not needed for sleep to happen. We don’t have to have sleep confidence for sleep to happen. Martin: Just like we don’t. need to have breathing confidence for breathing to happen, it’s, it’s great to have, but it’s, it’s not needed. And it’s another one of those things we can’t really control, and it tends to be quite fluid confidence in anything can come and go. We can feel really confident about something and then maybe we make a mistake or something happens and that confidence can be shot and we start to build it up again just through our own actions. Martin: Um, it can just be another one of those things. That can almost serve as a distraction. I need to, I need to get rid of anxiety. I need to create confidence. All these things we can’t really control. Um, and that can end up distracting us and creating more of a struggle. Sending us back into that quicksand again. Martin: And talking about things that ebb and flow, ups and downs. So when we were working together, I think it was after a couple of months, or maybe six to eight weeks, something like that. Um, you felt you were doing really well. And then all of a sudden, this difficult night showed up. Martin: So you found that because you’re a human being with a human brain, you had all those things. difficult thoughts and feelings turning up, fear, confusion, anxiety felt really powerful. Um, and I think you, you said to me that you felt like you jinx yourself because you’d sent me an email just telling me how well you’d been doing. Martin: And then all of a sudden that difficult night showed up and it’s so. It’s so easy, so tempting to then get pulled back into all of our old unworkable behaviors at that point, right? Because the brain kind of forgets that this is a process, that there’s ups and downs. Um, and it can want us to go back into all the old unworkable actions because they’re more familiar, regardless of whether they’re helpful or not. Martin: Um, how, how did you end up responding to that setback so that you didn’t get pulled back into the quicksand? Hmm. Rachel: Well, I think like, first it’s like getting, I think I remember that exchange and getting your response and feeling like, just confirming what I was like, trying to tell myself in my head of like, this is normal, this happens and like, you being so not anxious about it of like, of course, like that happens sometimes. Rachel: And just like thinking recently, like there was a, a couple months ago, I like had a really, like the, the week was turning into a bad week of sleep because, but like, it felt so much easier to identify the contributions to it. Like, I was really sick and like that was impacting my sleep. And then I think, like, the, the, being sick, that like just like took over the whole week. Rachel: But I, I remember having the thought of like, once I’m. Feeling a little better, I can like get myself back into these routines that are so helpful and that I know work, um. So yeah, just like normalizing that bad nights of sleep happen and also I have like tools so accessible to me that I have seen really work in like normalizing my sleep. Martin: So just briefly, because I know that I’ve already taken off a big chunk of your time today, which I’m really appreciative for. Um, if you were to reflect on, maybe the two or three changes that you made when we were working together that you found most helpful, um, what would you say they were? Rachel: I think the getting out of bed every day at the same time, which really sucked. Um, and, and I don’t necessarily do anymore. Um, and, uh, I think feeling, like, Less anxious about that time before sleep of like, still having routines that help me unwind and like relax, but not feeling so regimented about them and really not taking any sleep aids. Rachel: Um, because I now only see that they make me feel worse. Martin: So we were only working together for a couple of months, and that was about three years ago now. Mm-Hmm. . Um, how long would you say that it took for you to get to a point where, sleep wasn’t something you were just really struggling with? Um, maybe you felt like you’d emerged from the quicksand, um, and you just felt better able to live your life independently of sleep? Rachel: I, I think. By the, well, at least by the end of our six to eight weeks, my sleep had normalized or like, I, I wasn’t having the same insomnia or like sleep related anxiety, um, just like in the time of your program. And then I, like, I maintained the, be like, uh, the, the behavior changes that we’re describing. Rachel: Like. For a long time, um, and I, and I’ll still fall back on them, um, or use them when I’m, like, going through rough bouts of sleep, but actually regaining the, what felt like the ability to sleep happened within six to eight weeks, and I, I guess, like, really reducing my anxiety, I think my anxiety was reduced by the six to eight weeks just knowing I had these tools, and then feeling like, I didn’t have to like use the tools exactly as they had been prescribed. Rachel: Maybe like a year. Martin: Yeah. That’s, yeah, I think I, I, I like to ask that question in more recent episodes because for people listening to this, it can really sound like, which we are, we’re performing miracles here, right? That within a few weeks we can completely eliminate decades of insomnia and permanently delete anxiety and stuff like that, which. Martin: We can’t do. This is a process. Um, it’s all about removing ourselves from the process as much as possible, refocusing our attention, um, not being ruled by insomnia and sleep, being able to live independently of it. And that does take time. Um, and so I think it’s more realistic to think of this in terms of not so much weeks, but maybe more to do with months. Martin: It is a process that doesn’t mean we’re still going to be struggling for months, but it just means there’s going to be more, maybe more difficult setbacks. The brain’s still going to want to try pulling us back into that struggle again. And it’s going to take time to build skill in responding to this stuff in a different, in a different way. Martin: Um, because that’s really what it is, right? Like you touched upon this, these tools are in my back pocket, their skills and all skills take time to learn and develop. Rachel: Yeah, exactly. And I think, like, that feels, that just makes more sense to me and feels more realistic than, like, a pill that is claiming to, like, solve your sleep, that, like, of course this will be, like, a thing you have to, one has to dedicate themselves to. Martin: Yeah. Exactly. Well, Rachel, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and share your story. I do have one last question for you, um, which I try and ask every guest, and it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help, that they’ll just never be able to stop struggling with insomnia. Martin: They’ll never be able to get out of that quicksand. What would you say to them? Rachel: Uh, I’m, I know that pain, like, and I can just, like, feel it viscerally, like, in my body, like, hearing that, and it’s just not true, like, of course, like, I don’t know any conditions a person might have, but, like, I, I really thought that I was just doomed and I, and I think, like, one has the ability to sleep. Rachel: So there is hope I would want to share. Martin: That’s great. Well, thanks again, Rachel. I think that’s a reassuring and comforting and positive note to end on. So thank you again for coming on to the podcast. Rachel: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Martin. Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to get your life back from insomnia, I would love to help. You can learn more about the sleep coaching programs I offer at Insomnia Coach — and, if you have any questions, you can email me. Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Jessica's struggle with insomnia began on a family trip, and it worsened each time she traveled until it stuck around, even at home. No matter what she tried, her nights were filled with anxiety and struggle. Jessica found that her resistance to insomnia and the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with it were making things even more difficult. So, she changed her approach. She practiced accepting insomnia and anxiety. She learned to be kinder to herself. With ongoing practice, Jessica freed herself from an ongoing struggle and reclaimed her life from insomnia.

Eric’s insomnia journey began after he woke in the middle of the night and experienced a huge panic attack. From then on, sleep became very difficult. As he tried to fix things, Eric stopped watching TV in bed with his wife — something they both enjoyed. He tried napping, even though he never used to nap in the past. He tried sleeping on the couch. He tried sleeping in a chair. He tried blue-light-blocking glasses. He stopped traveling. He isolated himself as he became convinced that his struggles were reflected in his appearance. He would beat himself up every time he had a difficult night. Eric’s transformation began when he shifted his focus away from trying to control his sleep, his thoughts, and his feelings and redirected his efforts toward his actions. He started to do more of the things that mattered — even after difficult nights and even in the presence of difficult thoughts and feelings. He started to accept the presence of anxiety as a necessary ingredient for a rich and meaningful life. Eric found that the more he did this, the less power and influence sleep and anxiety seemed to have over his life. Eric was never into meditating but he started to practice meditation — not in an attempt to make sleep happen or to control his thoughts and feelings — but to practice and develop skill in making space for his thoughts rather than trying to fight or avoid them. He also gave himself permission to do something else during the night when he was awake, rather than tossing and turning. Today, sleep doesn’t consume Eric’s attention. His focus now is on controlling his actions and doing things that matter rather than trying to control his sleep and what he might be thinking or feeling. As a result, insomnia no longer holds Eric back. By practicing a new approach, Eric got his life back from insomnia. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay, Eric, thank you for taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast. Eric Flanders: Absolutely. Glad to be here with you. Martin Reed: Let’s start right at the beginning. If you could just tell us a little bit about when your issues with sleep first began and what you think may have caused those initial issues with sleep. Eric Flanders: Yeah, that’s a great question about what caused them because I think if I would have known that it would have helped out a lot, but I really struggled with that answer as to why. I know a couple of years ago. I had a couple of instances over the course of a year where I just was struggling. Eric Flanders: Like I would go two or three days and just not sleeping much at all. And it didn’t really bother me too much at the time. But I’ve had a little bit of anxiety over the course of my life. And the more it started happening, the worse I started to respond to it. And then I had family over to my house during the holidays and I had a rough night of sleep. Eric Flanders: I woke up in the middle of the night and I just was having like this huge panic attack. My heart was racing. I remember waking my wife and up saying, I think I need to go to the hospital. Like, I’m freaking out here. Everything is, it was really bad. And from that night on it Sleep became very difficult. Eric Flanders: And I think probably it added pressure to me because I had family staying at my house. And now I’m like, Oh my gosh, I’m not sleeping. My days were starting to get really bad. And that just led into a night after night. I had a looming doctor’s appointment as well coming up and I hadn’t been to the doctors in 20 years and my wife was forcing me to go just to get my blood drawn and I’m terrified of needles so that on top of everything else, it was just sleepless, sleepless nights. Eric Flanders: And that’s where it really started getting hard for me. Martin Reed: Were panic attacks something you’d dealt with in the past, or was this just kind of it just appeared in the middle of the night, out of the blue? Eric Flanders: Yeah, I mean, this was, I was 41 when this started happening, but when I was younger, around 17, I had lost my mom when I was younger, in my teenage years, and she battled heart disease her whole life. Eric Flanders: So I had some panic attacks at that point in time, thinking that I was Going to inherit those types of heart issues and anxiety can create some of those symptoms like you’re having some type of Health issues and so I did that for about I had it issues for like six months at that point in time And this was again when I was 17 and then but you know, but the doctor told me I was fine So that all went away Never had any issues, no panic attacks, no sleep issues, nothing like that leading up to this point in time. Martin Reed: Some people can really pinpoint the initial trigger for their sleep disruption, which then morphed into this longer term struggle or issue with sleep disruption and for other people, which it sounds like maybe is more aligned with what you’re describing. It doesn’t really seem to be this obvious trigger. Martin Reed: And so I think it’s really good to have. Both sides on both sides of that experience coming onto the podcast, because if we hear that people always can trace things back and there’s a clear and obvious trigger, then we might think, well, there’s something unique and unusual or vice versa. But really, the trigger itself, sometimes it can be obvious, sometimes not. Martin Reed: But largely it’s not that relevant if we find that the sleep disruption is sticking around for. More than just a few nights, it’s usually then becomes… Oh boy, it is. How we respond. Yeah. So on that note, when we’re talking about how we’re responding to it, how did you respond to that sleep disruption when it first started to show up? Eric Flanders: Yeah. I mean, at first it was just the usual stuff. I mean, my wife and I always watch TV in bed. It was always a thing of ours. I’m like, okay. Let me just stop doing that. Right. And again, this was one of my family was there. I’m not a napper at all. And I never have been. And I found myself, Oh, I’m just going to lay down in the afternoon and, try to get some rest so I could at least be, okay, while my family was there. Eric Flanders: But when I would do that, I would just. Obviously not sleep in there while I was trying to nap and that would just make me more frustrated. I didn’t do a bunch more because I had that doctor’s appointment coming up that I just talked to you about and so I had tried those things but now I’m going on like two weeks and I’m sleeping maybe a couple hours a night, if that. Eric Flanders: And I’m moving around. So now I’m trying to sleep on the couch and trying to sleep in the chair. I’m not even sleeping in the bed anymore. And now at this point, my family’s left and gone back to their home. And I’m still, now I’m really panicked. And so by the time I had my doctor’s appointment, I mentioned to him that, obviously I’m having these sleep issues. Eric Flanders: And so he said, well, I’m going to get you sleep and don’t worry about it. I’ll get you sleeping. And that’s when I ended up. With another challenge, which was going down a path of medication and trying to solve the sleep that way. Martin Reed: Back when all this was going on, the kind of, the origin of your experience were there any characteristics of a typical night? Martin Reed: What was an average night like when things were really difficult back then? Eric Flanders: Man, so I have I have a little issue with control, which I’ve obviously gotten better at, because you have to learn that you can’t control some things, and I’ve learned that sleep is one of those, but it took me a long time to figure that out, and so I would go to bed early, like, I’m going to bed at like eight o’clock at night, and that is unusual for me, and I would typically toss and turn in there. Eric Flanders: I mean, for a very long time, maybe three or four hours, and then I would move out to the front room and lay on the recliner and try to sleep out there and do the same thing. And, I would have these moments where, you’re sleeping, but you can, you’re not really sleeping. You’re like in between. Eric Flanders: That’s what most of my sleep was. And that was a typical night, every night. And it didn’t get much better for a very long time. Martin Reed: How about the days? What were the days like? Were you finding that it was also influencing the quality of your days or maybe what you did each day? Eric Flanders: Oh yeah. I’m a big workout guy. Eric Flanders: I like going to the gym. I stopped doing that. I had a very responsible job. I had a couple hundred employees at the time and I still went to work, but I found myself shutting the door a lot to my office and I’m a guy that’s always usually out and, with my teams and I was not doing that a lot. Eric Flanders: I was isolating myself a bit. And just trying to like, I didn’t want folks to see what was happening with me because I felt like everybody could see it on my face. Like, oh he looks, because I felt horrible, you just feel horrible. And so I would always think that, man, they’re going to see right through me. Eric Flanders: So it absolutely affected my days. I stopped traveling, isolated myself with my family at my house and I became terrified to go anywhere. Martin Reed: I think it’s really understandable why we end up doing all of these things, and you touched upon many of the reasons, right? We either, we don’t feel as capable or we feel like we need to get more rest in, so we do less of the stuff that we would normally do. Martin Reed: Yeah. Or we worry about what other people might think about us or what they might see in us. Eric Flanders: Yeah. Martin Reed: I’m curious to know did you ever ask anyone if it was noticeable? Like, could they tell that you’d had a difficult night? I Martin Reed: always asked my wife, right, if she could… How do I look? I feel like I, I look horrible. I know I look horrible. It’s just like, you don’t look any different at all. And what I found myself doing a lot is taking selfies. Like I can’t, I’m never like I was a selfie guy, but I would always take pictures of myself just to see what do I look like right now? Martin Reed: What do I look like? What do I look like? And I still have those photos on my phone. At the time when I saw those photos, I was like, Oh my gosh, I look like a wreck. But when I look at them today, I look completely fine. And so it was really just in my mind, I’d convinced myself that I must look the way I’m feeling. Martin Reed: And so I made a lot of decisions based off of that. Martin Reed: It’s really interesting that you said that and you’ve got that, that record of it that you can now look back and actually see. What you saw, but it’s different to what you saw, if that makes sense, like your interpretation of what you were seeing was different. Martin Reed: And it’s a concern that a lot of people have discussed with me. I’m really concerned about like the circles under my eyes or my eyes look really tired, I don’t want to look this way. What will other people think about me? And it’s all totally understandable. And I think one thing that can help is just as you described, maybe it’s not quite as noticeable. Martin Reed: As you suspect maybe what you’re seeing might be different to what other people are seeing. Yeah. But also, can we control that? Can we control what we look like? I mean, maybe to a certain extent, you might want to put some lipstick on or something like that. Who knows? Lots of eyeshadow. Eric Flanders: But you look the way you look! Martin Reed: Exactly. It’s one of those things we can’t really change. It’s the only thing we can really control are our actions. So maybe we can be kind to ourselves if we’re feeling that we’re not looking the greatest or not feeling the greatest, but then maybe do some other stuff that matters to us, even though we’ve got those big dark circles under our eyes. Martin Reed: And even though we might be thinking that other people might be judging us or making up stories about our appearance, we can’t control any of that stuff, right? We can only control what we do and I think maybe we’ll explore that a little bit more as we continue to talk, but I just found it really interesting that you actually have that photographic evidence that you can now look back on and be like, wow, I can’t really see any differences now, but back then it was real, right? Martin Reed: You saw differences. And that was like one of the concerns. Eric Flanders: Yeah, it’s amazing what it’s amazing how your thoughts can really work against you in a way, I mean, your, the mind is so powerful and your thoughts really can be your worst enemy or they can be your best asset. Right. And it’s just a matter of how you engage with your thoughts is what I’ve really learned over the last couple of years. Eric Flanders: And yeah, at that point in time, my thoughts were telling me that I, Must have looked horrible, right? And so that’s what I was believing. Martin Reed: On the role of thoughts. I think that’s a kind of good segue into talking a little bit more about the role they can have. As many people listening to this or struggling with insomnia are going to be able to identify that if only I could get rid of the anxiety or get rid of the worry or not feel so frustrated with all of this struggle maybe I’ll be able to sleep better. So then we focus on trying to get rid of all these thoughts and these feelings or challenging them or pushing them away when they show up. Martin Reed: Can you tell us a little bit more about your own experience with all those thoughts and feelings? And, did you find that they were? Making things more difficult. How did you initially try and fix that and reduce the influence of those thoughts and feelings? Eric Flanders: Yeah, I mean, they were really taking over. Eric Flanders: I have listened to many of your podcasts when I was going through this and they really did help me out a lot. And I heard a lot of people talk about feelings and thoughts and they were absolutely in my worst way I was for a period of there were I was really beating myself up and just thinking about it constantly, constantly thinking about it looking up stuff, which would just make it worse, and now it’s all I’m thinking about every day. Eric Flanders: Put me in a panic attack at night, I remember I, we had some email exchanges several times and, I was telling you, how do I get this anxiety to go away? It just won’t, it’s the same thing, eight, nine o’clock at night, bedtimes coming around and like, all of a sudden you think you’re going to go have to like present in front of 1000 people. Eric Flanders: And of course, you’re not going to sleep that way. And then you try to control it even more. And I tried to control that by just going to bed. That’s what I would do to deal with it. I’d be like, okay, I’m just gonna go fight this right now. And I don’t care if I don’t sleep, I’m just gonna go lay down. Eric Flanders: That’s what I did and that’s why I had a really hard time with some of the tactics was because I was just wanting to be in control. And so, In order to deal with these thoughts, I would just go lay in bed, and I’d lay there and toss and turn, have a miserable night, and beat myself up all night about it, but at least I was in control, and trying to deal with it that way, and they were very consuming though, it took, I mean literally I spent all day. Eric Flanders: For, I don’t know, a year, probably, thinking about it. Martin Reed: You mentioned that when you find your mind was just going into overdrive, like about sleep and anything else that it wanted to go off and think about, you were just right, I’m just going to go to bed now. So you just go off to bed. Martin Reed: I’m guessing that then you’d be in bed. And the kind of thoughts would still be churning around in your mind. So now you’re in bed, so you can’t get into bed again, right? How would you respond then to when all these thoughts started to reappear once you were in bed? Eric Flanders: I would wrestle with them all for a very long time. Eric Flanders: And instead of getting out of bed and dealing with just being awake, I would just stay in bed and would drive me crazy because I’d get in bed and like, if I’m not sleeping in two minutes, I’m already thinking, well, there we go. I’m not going to sleep tonight. And then that just spiraled into stuff. Eric Flanders: And by that time, my wife’s already asleep because of course she sleeps like a baby, just like everyone who has insomnia. Usually the person next to him sleeps like a baby. And yeah, I would just stay in bed. And that was a very hard piece for me to start to deal with was removing myself. Eric Flanders: And what happened is I started to hate my bed. I hated it. I hated looking at it. I would go in the room and I’d find myself, like, giving it the side eye, like it was somebody I just did not like. And it just did not find it… appealing at all. So it was a whole like having to relearn that whole thing for me. Martin Reed: How about we talk about that now, like that, that relearning process or exploring a different approach. So you mentioned that a change in your approach when things started to get difficult was you’d go to bed earlier. You found yourself wrestling with your thoughts. You implied that You were staying in bed, whereas maybe an alternative option that was available could be getting out of bed. Martin Reed: Curious to hear, the change in approach that you took and how, what that experience was like. Eric Flanders: For me cause it, it sounds like from everybody that I’ve watched on these podcasts and just the different groups I’ve looked at Everyone’s got a different thing that really hit home for them. Eric Flanders: And for me, it was the piece where you talked about, like, don’t change what your plans were the next day, or are the next day, right? So, go live your life to the fullest. And when I did those things, and I started to do those things, what happened is I… I started like being able to convince to myself that I was actually, my thoughts weren’t right. Eric Flanders: That, they were telling me that, Oh my gosh, I’m going to have a horrible day tomorrow because I’m not going to sleep. But then I found myself not having horrible days all the time and being able to enjoy myself. And so it was that piece. And then honestly, it was time. It was being able to have a great couple of nights of sleep, maybe not have a great night that third night, maybe not that fourth night either, but still living my life to the fullest, but then that fifth night I would have a great night of sleep again. Eric Flanders: And then just repeating that pattern over time, slowly it started convincing myself, like, sleep is not the end all be all. I mean, it’s important, but it’s really not the end all be all. You can absolutely live a great life and not have to be so concerned about your sleep. And over time, and challenging my thought processes, and challenging thoughts to just be what they are, and that’s, they’re simply a thought, right, they started to lose their power. Martin Reed: I’m curious to hear when you had this suggestion of continuing to do things that matter, or living your life as though. The insomnia wasn’t there, or living your life even though the insomnia is there. What that was like, because, the reason I ask that is because some of us, when we’re really struggling, we can just be 100 percent convinced that we just can’t, we just can’t do either everything we had planned, or some of the things we had planned. Martin Reed: Or certain activities and just the idea of doing some stuff, doing, following through with our plans or doing anything related to our plans or even just getting out of the house can just feel like it’s going to be impossible because we might have had two, three, four, five, six or more nights in a row. Martin Reed: Very little sleep. What was your experience like with that? Was this something that was a difficult change for you to make, or was it difficult to push yourself to, to stay active and do things that you had planned? Eric Flanders: It was one of the hardest things. I mean, I say it as it’s easy, but let me just add that challenging those things up front at first was very hard for me. Eric Flanders: I remember. Towards the end of, and I get to say the end, but towards the end of my insomnia days, where I was still really in the midst of it. I was living in Florida at the time, and my daughter and family is in California. My daughter is getting married. And I have not gone anywhere. in two years now, right? Eric Flanders: Because I’ve been dealing with this insomnia and I’ve really isolated myself and I know I have to fly to, I have to fly to California. I have to be out there for five days. I’ve got to walk my daughter down the aisle. All of these things. And I think I worried and freaked out about this and this trip for like six months from the day. Eric Flanders: She told me I was like, oh my gosh It’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming and I remember getting to California and with my family and that first night we got here I didn’t sleep one minute not one minute and I was you know, we’re in a strange bed, And I’m up all night. I’m telling my wife. Oh my gosh, like this is gonna be a wreck And how am I going to do this? Eric Flanders: And the next day I just went throughout the day. My family was all with me in the in, we’re all together and challenged my, my, I forced myself to just be normal as much as possible. And you know what? That next night I slept and that was a big milestone for me. Cause I’m like, okay, wait a second. Eric Flanders: I thought I was never going to be able to sleep anywhere again. Right. And granted the first night was not very good, but the second night I slept really well. And then I’m like, I think I’ve got some going here. And then the next few nights I I had some decent sleep, but not complete sleep, but I was able to completely. Eric Flanders: Go to the wedding and have a great time. Walk my daughter down the aisle. So everything I told myself for that six months was not true. And had I not gone, because believe me, there were times where I said, I’m just not going to go. I would have just reinforced everything that was not true. And I would have, it probably would not have gotten better for me, but because I decided to go. Eric Flanders: Face that thought and challenge it. That’s what really helped me out. And that was a big breaking point for me. That was a big breakthrough. And then two months later, I sold my house in florida and I moved to California. Still having some sleep issues, but I mean, selling your house, moving across country, all of that goes in with all that stresses and all that. Eric Flanders: Still, I started challenging everything and the more I challenged it, the more I felt like I was Letting go. Martin Reed: There’s so much powerful stuff there. I think maybe the key insight there is that we can still commit to actions. Regardless of what our brain might be telling us, what the thoughts that are showing up might be. Martin Reed: So, even though you had all those thoughts, all those doubts, all those worries, maybe all those anxieties, or lack of confidence, I can’t do this, I shouldn’t do this. You should… Went ahead and did it, even though your mind was just churning out all those different and very difficult thoughts, feelings, stories, emotions. Martin Reed: And I think when we have that experience of being able to recognize that we can still control our actions, regardless of what our mind might be telling us. That can be really powerful to experience, that we have thoughts and we have actions and our thoughts don’t necessarily have to control our actions. Martin Reed: That’s something that we can still control no matter what our mind might be churning out. Eric Flanders: Yeah, and you know what else I was doing is… Is I, would have a night or two of bad sleep, or no sleep, and that would start the whole thought, which you know is wrong, is I’m not, I’m never gonna sleep again. Eric Flanders: I don’t know how many times I’ve told myself that, over and over again. Even if I would have a couple of good nights of sleep, the second I would have a bad night of sleep, I’m like, Not gonna sleep again. And for some reason that was a very believable thought even though I had been sleeping you know eventually you fall asleep and When you really start believing it and I again, I think it has to do with time and I say time Meaning that you’re not trying to do anything to fix sleep Like you’re challenging it 100 percent on your own without anything there to help you. Eric Flanders: Because once you add a crutch, then you start thinking the crutch is what caused it. You have, for me, it was about, I’m not going to do anything. I’m just going to go at it and then I started learning over time, and that’s what brought the anxiety down is, you start to your mind starts to learn that, hey, this isn’t right. Eric Flanders: That’s not that thought is not correct. And so now, I mean, if I have a bad night of sleep now, which I still do it’s totally fine. That’s totally fine. Tomorrow I’m going to the gym. I’m working out like crazy. And I’m gonna, I know I’m going to sleep eventually. And I do. Martin Reed: That’s another one of those places where there can be that disconnect, right? Martin Reed: So I just, well, we just both talked about that disconnect between our thoughts and our actions. Another one can be there’s often a disconnect between our thoughts and our experience. So our thoughts might be telling us something like. We’re never going to sleep again, ever, which is really scary. But our experience tells us that’s never happened. Martin Reed: We might have a thought that says, if I go into work after another night of no sleep, I’m going to get fired. I’m going to lose my house. I’m going to be homeless on the streets. Our experience tells us, well, that’s not happened. I mean, that’s not to say it won’t necessarily happen. Nobody can predict the future with 100 percent accuracy. Martin Reed: But often, this kind of stories our brain generates whilst it’s working really hard to look out for us and protect us and help us do what matters. There can be this kind of disconnect between what it’s saying. And what we know from experience to be maybe more accurate or more likely. Eric Flanders: Yeah, I’m not a big reader. Eric Flanders: But I found myself doing lots of reading on anxiety and things like that. Just trying to educate myself on it. And there was one thing that really stuck with me and that was there was this phrase initiate to generate, right? And that’s what I, you started doing. And this, you have to initiate. Eric Flanders: A situation in which you are going to feel anxious about in order to generate new learnings behind it, right? So it was initiate to generate so I started just saying to myself I’m nervous right now to go do this But then I said I’ll have to go do it because I can’t generate any new experiences behind that thought Until I do it and I had done these I mean, I mean I had anxiety about so many things because I took over at this point, because I was starting to believe in all of these thoughts and I had to really relearn a lot of different things. Eric Flanders: And the only way you can really do that is to go out and challenge those thoughts and see that it’s not all true and by doing that, yeah, I was able to really get out of that dark spot I was in. Martin Reed: I think another example of that whole thoughts versus experience, similar to what you were just describing, I think that’s another reason why we can so easily get stuck, just trying so hard to make sleep happen, or to wrestle with our thoughts and our feelings. Martin Reed: We get tangled up in that struggle. And our experience is telling us this isn’t working. This has been going on for a long time. We’re not really getting where we want to go. But our mind is telling us well, I’m a little bit out of ideas here. Maybe you don’t hear that part, but the brain’s out of ideas. Martin Reed: So it just says, well, let’s just keep doing what we’re doing and we’ll just try harder. So we’ll just try even harder to get rid of these thoughts, these feelings. We’ll try even harder to make sleep happen. We’ll try even harder to get rid of that wakefulness. So that’s just another one of those kind of disconnects, right? Martin Reed: So we can be convinced that we just need to keep doing what we’re doing. Maybe something will change, but our experience on the other hand. is telling us, well look, there’s nothing’s been changing up to this point. But it can be really hard because They, our thoughts can be so convincing, right? They can just seem like they’re 100 percent true. Martin Reed: They’re complete facts. And we trust our brains, right? We recognize that the brain has been with us our whole lives. Generally does a good job of steering us in the direction we want to go. So when we get these thoughts that, are scary, worrying. big obstacles to the life we want to live, we can just assume that they’re 100 percent true 100 percent of the time and that’s just another one of those areas where we can get a little bit tripped up. Martin Reed: That’s right. Yeah, I mean, it snowballs, I mean, you can, you start worrying about sleep and that can really get your fight or flight activated. Right. And now that transfers over to other things in your life. And now all of a sudden, your anxiety is just running, on superpower and at no fault of your own. Eric Flanders: Right. It’s just. It’s just that’s what happens and you’re and then it’s your mind can really become a little bit addicted unfortunately to worry and You can find yourself just doing it more and sleep could have been the cause of that Initially, or maybe that was the effect of you worrying about other things. Eric Flanders: I don’t know but either way You know that whole thought process is a game changer And being, and it’s helped me in other parts of my life, that would give me anxiety before now I’m, I just, I don’t engage with those thoughts like I used to. Martin Reed: Going back to that experiment that you said that you were doing I’ve forgotten the phrase, it was initiate to… Eric Flanders: Initiate to generate. Martin Reed: Initiate to generate. Yeah. Let me ask you a question about that. Did you find that maybe whilst you were engaged in those experiments that it… It reminded you or made you more aware of the fact that when we do things that matter to us… Even not completely unrelated to sleep, but just when we’re doing things that matter to us, things that are important, often some difficult stuff will come with that. Martin Reed: So, for example, off the top of my head, just the idea of walking your daughter down the aisle, oh, what if I trip? I’m gonna feel some anxiety, maybe some worry. Or if I want to advance my career, I have to do a job interview, so I get the butterflies, I get the anxieties. When you are engaged in that experiment, Was that something that you noticed too? Martin Reed: Did it reinforce this idea that in order to do things that matter, we have to make a little bit of space for some of that difficult stuff too? Eric Flanders: Yeah. Yeah, I still do that today. I mean, I, with my job, I do a lot of presenting. And even today I tell myself for an hour before I’m getting on camera, it’s like, oh my gosh, all of these things can go wrong, and I’ve done this my entire life with having to do that, but. Eric Flanders: Now it’s not so powerful. It’s still there and the thoughts are there. I mean, I don’t push them away or try to ignore them, but I just don’t engage completely with them anymore. Now I’ve learned that those things could possibly happen. Yes, they absolutely could possibly happen. But does that mean they’re going to happen? Eric Flanders: No. And that’s the difference. Not saying, they’re not going, not trying to remove them completely by saying, yeah, those can’t happen. Yeah, everything can happen, but it doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen. Like the worst case scenario type of thing. Martin Reed: Oh, 100%. And, just whilst you were describing that to me, I can just use this discussion that we’re recording right now, so an hour or so before, even earlier in the day today, I’m thinking, right, everything I’ve got to get ready for this discussion with you, right? Martin Reed: And then my brain is like, what if the batteries run out on this light that you’ve got up here? What if the power goes out? What if there’s a power outage? What if the trains will start going by? What if I completely freeze up and I forget all the questions that I plan to answer? What if I get a cough? Martin Reed: What if I lose my voice? All of this stuff is going through my mind, right? And, when, for the first few podcast episodes a few years ago, They would feel way more powerful than they do now because I didn’t have that experience to support that I can still do this even when the brain’s churning, barreling along at a million miles an hour. Martin Reed: But even to this day, with years of experience doing this, I’m still getting those thoughts. But the difference now is, I think it’s a skill. I’ve got more skill in acknowledging them and being able to just know from experience that, alright, this is my brain looking out for me. Thanks brain, you’re just keeping me better prepared for what I’m about to do. Martin Reed: And just maybe keep me a little bit sharper, maybe. But it’s not something that kind of hooks me, jerks me around, and makes it impossible for me to act anymore. It’s something that I can still do these things when my brain is doing all the things it chooses to do. Eric Flanders: Yeah, because your mind just wants to, it’s just trying to protect you, right? Eric Flanders: It’s trying to protect you from an embarrassing moment or from failure. And unfortunately, we all are really scared of failing these days. I mean, it’s just what we’re brought up with, right? Don’t fail. So yeah, everything that you’re doing, you’re, you convince yourself of that, but you’re right, you have to go put yourself in those situations, or at least I did. Eric Flanders: I had to really put myself in situations that challenged what my thoughts were. And it was the hardest thing ever, and it didn’t always feel good. And I think that’s the key, like sometimes you’ll go do it. You won’t want to do something, but you’ll go do it anyways. And sometimes it just doesn’t feel good while you’re doing it. Eric Flanders: But when you’re done doing it, even though it didn’t feel good, it’s still another learning experience. Like I didn’t die, it wasn’t the end of the world. It wasn’t the greatest of times, but it wasn’t the worst of times. It wasn’t the end of the world. And so. Just making sure you go and do those things is extremely important and it really helped me out with my my sleep. Martin Reed: I think sometimes it can be helpful to just maybe ask ourselves what the alternative is to whatever we’re doing, so if we feel like What we’re doing now isn’t getting us where we want to be. Is there an alternative approach? So for example, if we’re calling in sick to work on a lot of days, if we’re cancelling plans, we might just ask ourselves, is there an alternative here that we can even just experiment with? Martin Reed: If we’re spending a lot of our time battling with our thoughts, trying to push them away when they arrive, wrestling with them is there an alternative here? Because sometimes, you just like you touched upon when you said, I would just do things. I would still do things even after difficult nights, even when those difficult thoughts and feelings turned up. Martin Reed: Because if we don’t do that, what is the alternative? In that example, it’s doing less of the things that matter. And when we do less of the things that matter. We tend not to get to where we want to be or where we want to go. Eric Flanders: That’s right. Yeah. And then usually you’re sitting in your house obsessing over. Eric Flanders: What’s going on in the first place, and you’re not even allowing your mind to, to go somewhere else, right, or experiencing something else and that obsession can really become your life. And it certainly was my life for a good period of time. Martin Reed: You’ve talked about how you would, experiment with actually seeking out some difficult thoughts and feelings just to practice almost like an exposure therapy. Martin Reed: But basically by just complete, just allowing yourself to experience it. Maybe moving away from thoughts, directly influencing your behavior, being able to practice taking a step back when your thoughts might be saying one thing, taking a step back and then deciding how to respond to them. Was there anything else, that in your experience was helpful in terms of letting go of that struggle? Martin Reed: With the thoughts and the feelings that tend to show up either when you’re awake during the night or when your brain starts to think all about sleep and the upcoming night during the day. Eric Flanders: Really, for me it was really that. Piece that we’ve already touched on, which is just trying to challenge the next day and I really needed to convince myself that This wasn’t true because I tried everything You know I was staying up later. Eric Flanders: I was getting up in the middle of the night and I was even trying to be physically active and all those types of things, but I wasn’t doing it to the extent that I wanted to. And it really, the game changer for me was challenging it and allowing time and, not influencing it, trying to do something to influence sleep. Eric Flanders: That was the biggest thing I was always trying to do something to improve on it and I touched on the medication piece. I had I don’t know how many times things I tried but I had Returned a bag of medication to the pharmacy and I have never taken medication in my whole life ever I’m like an anti medication guy and Not to say that it’s not a good thing for some folks But for me, it just wasn’t the answer but I had a bag like that of different medications that I had been prescribed over the course of this year and a half through different doctors because I had seen therapists and primary care physicians and all of these things and the answer was that, but you know, as always, anything you try, maybe it doesn’t work. Eric Flanders: Maybe it doesn’t, but if it does work, it’s not going to work for long for me, right? It would work a couple of days a month at the most. And then it wasn’t. And then so I had this medication thing along the road with me for A year and a half and then, I finally said enough is enough and I needed to do this on my own. Eric Flanders: And so I just let everything go. I stopped trying to use medication as a supplement. I stopped everything, which was not easy. It was very hard. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. Trying to get rid of all of that, but I did. And when I faced it on my own and I just let it run its course and just live my life the way I knew I wanted to do it and challenged my thoughts And I challenged them with my actions. That’s what really changed it for me. Martin Reed: It sounds like your approach to the medication You just recognize this was something that it was important to you not to take medication if it could be avoided. Martin Reed: So did you just make that decision? I’m just not gonna go down this route. This isn’t a path I’m gonna take anymore. I’m just gonna stop. It was like a cold turkey or I’m not even gonna go on it. Or was it like a tapering process? I’m just curious to hear a little bit more about that. Eric Flanders: I had tried both. I had tried, I tried tapering for a while and I found that it was just prolonging my experience, and I wanted to just be at my core and deal with this on my own at the time, and so, I’m not a religious guy very much either, I mean, but I have gone to church before, and so I, Went to church one day and I was sitting in there all by myself because it was in the middle of the afternoon and I was at a breaking point and I was breaking down obviously in church and by myself and I, whether it was a sign or not, but I just asked myself and I was speaking out loud and just said, what should I do? Eric Flanders: And I remember thinking about, should I just, Give up on all this stuff and let it go and feel comfortable. And the bells ring. I mean, it happened to be, the time the bells ring anyways, but it was assigned to me. And from that day on, I went home and I told my wife, I said, I’m done with this. Eric Flanders: And, again, one of the hardest things that I’ve ever gone through in my life trying to get away from that. But it was absolutely for me the right thing to do because I knew that I needed to be able to approach my sleep without anything or any help. And. It was making it more difficult. Martin Reed: Did, I’m just curious, did your doctor give you any kind of suggestions? Did you talk to them about, this is a kind of route, this is something I want to get away from. Did they offer you any suggestions on a useful way forward for that? Eric Flanders: Tapering is the safest way to do it and that’s always going to be the medical recommendation. Eric Flanders: But for me, it was, I was in such a bad place when I was on the medication and It was the same when I was tapering and I’m like, this can’t, this is so bad. I can’t do this for six more months. And that’s what I was thinking about. Like, this is going to be a six month taper and I’m not going to be able to do this. Eric Flanders: And so I just, I knew it was going to be very hard. I knew it was going to cause. Some hardships, just letting go of it. But I did, and I remember that day and it was hard. It was very hard and they recommended all kinds of things like go do yoga. Practice meditation. Eric Flanders: So I did start meditating which did help. I got an app on my phone and I had never been a guy or meditating type of person. I would totally have said that’s for the birds before, but it helped a lot because when you’re just sitting there I, that’s where I really learned that thoughts are thoughts, cause my mind, when you close your eyes and you just by yourself your mind takes over and. Eric Flanders: Then you can really recognize thought patterns and just let them be and not engage with them. And the better and more practice you, you do the better you get at just letting things go. And so I guess meditation did help in a way. I really don’t do it as much as I used to, but. It does help with thought patterns. Martin Reed: What was the medication that you were taking at the time? Eric Flanders: Oh man, I mean, I took all kinds of stuff. I took I took a Klonopin, which is a benzo, right? And I took that for a while. The other medications I was on… were more anxiety driven at medication. So the doctor was trying to help my anxiety go away. Eric Flanders: But all of the anxiety medications that I was trying were making my anxiety worse. And because I wasn’t handling what was causing my anxiety. And so, I took 20 different anxiety medications over the course of a year, which I would not recommend. But yeah, I tried hydroxyzine. That was something they prescribed to me at first, which is just like a Benadryl type of thing. Eric Flanders: That was for sleep. And then the Klonopin was later. I didn’t take that for very long, but all of these things I had to get off of. And then I ended up taking Mirtazapine, which is a older anxiety medication, which also can help her sleep. And so that was another one that I was taking at the end there, but I just let them all go. Eric Flanders: And I remember the doctor that I had who had prescribed those she was saying, look, if you’re not going to, if you’re not going to do what I’m telling you to do, like we just can’t see each other anymore. I guess we’re done. Because I just was not going to take the medication and that was what her only answer was. Martin Reed: It’s been great listening to you describe, your change in your approach to the wakefulness and the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it and doing things that matter and a lot of that is When we’re awake, it’s daytime, lots of distractions available to us. How does that translate to changing your approach at night? Martin Reed: Because fewer distractions, right, at night we tend to be more alone, less social, less of a social environment, fewer distractions. How do you change your response toward a day? difficult thoughts and feelings that can come with the wakefulness and that temptation to start wrestling with it again and tossing and turning and dealing with all that difficult stuff. Martin Reed: How do you change your approach there? Eric Flanders: Yeah, and those thoughts don’t go away. For me, at least they haven’t, right? So I still go to sleep at night. And I think if you’ve had insomnia, like really have had it, man, I don’t know if those thoughts ever go away because it’s like a very traumatic experience. Eric Flanders: It so when I go to sleep I still have those thoughts. They still are in my mind saying, I’ve been laying here five minutes, and and, but now I say, well, so what? I’ve been laying here five minutes, who cares? And that could turn into an hour. And it’s, I still, at this point, now am I’m totally fine with being awake. Eric Flanders: And, cause I know eventually I’m gonna fall asleep. And you will if your thoughts don’t create these emotions. That trigger all kinds of like chemical responses in your body where, now you got adrenaline going on, right? And your sugar levels start spiking and all of this stuff starts happening. Eric Flanders: But if you just let those thoughts be, and they still happen for me often it will be fine. Like you will fall, you’ll fall asleep. And I don’t find myself thinking about it very much though, before I get in bed anymore. So like, when it’s dark and it’s eight o’clock I’m enjoying my evening with my wife and my son. Eric Flanders: And sometimes I go to bed with my wife. Sometimes I stay up and watch TV. It’s no big deal anymore. But when I get in bed, I close my eyes, there’s the thoughts still happening, and it’s totally okay. And I would say it’s okay if those thoughts are happening. That’s what I would say to myself if I could. Eric Flanders: It’s totally fine that those thoughts are happening. It doesn’t mean anything, but that’s not easy when you’re going through it. Oh, man. Martin Reed: Yeah. Exactly, and I’m so glad that you do keep emphasizing that because it’s, I think it is one thing to say You know, yeah, I just have to allow these thoughts. Martin Reed: But the thing is, we don’t want to allow them, because they don’t feel good. Now, but what again, it’s going back to what’s the alternative, if we don’t allow these thoughts to just flow through us to come and go as they choose, the alternative is to battle with them. What does your own experience tell you there? Martin Reed: If your own experience is telling you that battling isn’t really helping, then maybe it’s time to experiment with that new approach. Yeah. And allow the thoughts to come and go even when they are really difficult. Eric Flanders: It is so hard to, yeah, I mean, I heard folks say that on these types of calls and I’m like, wait, that sounds amazing. Eric Flanders: Like, please, I just want to be that person. Like, how are they doing that? How does that just happen? And. Going back to what I said before it only happened for me when I started to just one night of no sleep, two nights, no sleep, three nights, no sleep, a couple, I didn’t care. I went and did what I wanted to do. Eric Flanders: It was very hard to do it sometimes, but I did it anyways. And so when I started laying in bed and those thoughts would happen now, I could tell myself like, what’s it matter? Like tomorrow, I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do anyways. It doesn’t really matter. Like I, I don’t need to have a sleep tonight. And that’s hard to, again, say when you’re sitting on the other side of it. Eric Flanders: But at the end of the day, if you get up the next day, stay up. You’re, you can go do what you want to do. You can. You can go do whatever you want. You’ll probably surprise yourself. And so the thoughts lost their steam after that, but when I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live, when I was purposely not going out, when I was not seeing my friends, when I wasn’t just going to the gym and doing all these things, not flying around, like I love traveling, not doing any of that, it really gave all those thoughts power. Eric Flanders: And so those thoughts become real powerless when you just, who cares? And it doesn’t happen overnight. I mean, this is a process. Martin Reed: Absolutely. It is a process. I’m keen to hear your thoughts on that. It was, if you are going to reflect back on when you were really tangled up in the struggle, and it felt really difficult to when you get to a point where it feels like, I can live my life independently of this stuff. Martin Reed: It’s not something that is always on my mind. I’m always trying to troubleshoot. If you had to put an approximate timeline on that process, on that part of the journey, how long would you say roughly that took? Eric Flanders: When I really started challenging my thoughts and doing what I wanted to do and live the way I want to, I really… Eric Flanders: saw slow progress over the course of maybe three or four months. And so I was constantly having to challenge things. And then it took about six months for me to start really feeling comfortable about those difficult thoughts. So it was not overnight. And I don’t think everyone’s timeline is the same. Eric Flanders: I will say that I, when I listened to some of the things I’m like, well, man, that maybe their situation just wasn’t as bad as mine, and so I would keep telling myself that. So I wanted to really tell everybody who’s going to listen to this. I was literally in the worst case scenario possible in my mind. Eric Flanders: Like it was that bad, just knowing who I am where I was at. And so it took longer for me. It wasn’t overnight. And but I kept at it. I kept doing it and doing it and just, wouldn’t let sleep prevent me from doing what I wanted to do and I took on another job. Eric Flanders: I got promoted, all these things happened while I was challenging all of this stuff. And Yeah, I’m here today because I did that. Martin Reed: Yeah, everyone’s timeline is different, but I think the one thing that they all share in common is they’re always longer than we want them to be. We always want to make that progress really quickly. Eric Flanders: They are longer. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. But it’s another one of those things we just can’t control, right? Just like we can’t control sleep itself. We can’t control what goes through our minds. We can’t control the timeline. We can only control. the implementation, the practice, the exploring a new approach if our previous or current approach isn’t working. Martin Reed: That’s the only thing we can control is we can control what we’re doing on the journey. We can’t control when we’re going to reach that final outcome. And it often takes longer than we’d like. That’s for sure. Eric Flanders: Yeah. Eric Flanders: And I’m not a patient guy, so it was really yeah, it was really working against me because of, control. Eric Flanders: I’m a little bit of a controlling guy, gotten better at that. No patience. Like, I mean, yeah! Martin Reed: Did you change your approach in terms of like when you would go to bed at night? Because I remember at the start of our discussion, you said you started to go to bed a lot earlier at night. Did you is that one of the things you change? Martin Reed: You started to go to bed either later at night or more closely to when you used to go back to when you used to go to bed before all of this struggle appeared. Eric Flanders: Yeah, i, I, so I had a hard time with it because. I knew that staying up was the right answer, but when I found myself being awake and of course you’re the only one awake when you’re doing this, right, your family’s sleeping and you want to be in there. Eric Flanders: And so I had a really hard time with being awake by myself and it would just make me more anxious. And so I would give into that anxiety and just go lay in bed, which would make it even worse. So I would stay up late. And then I would go to bed and then I would jump out and so, at first I was going to bed early and then I slowly started like extending my hours and then that changed over time. Eric Flanders: Now I, I just go to bed when my wife goes to bed. I mean, I moved to California, like I said, and hours changed, right? The time zones changed, all that changed and we still work on East Coast timeframes. So, I’m starting. work and my wife at 530 in the morning here, and that would have terrified me before. Eric Flanders: How am I supposed to do that? And now I like getting up early, which I would never have done before, but I actually enjoy getting up early and seeing the sun come up and having a cup of coffee, whereas when I was really overthinking everything, it was giving me severe anxiety getting up earlier. Eric Flanders: So yeah, the sleep times changed for me. Martin Reed: And how about responding to the wakefulness with actions during the night? Were you one of those people that found it helpful to get out of bed when your mind was in overdrive, or were you one of those people that prefer to stay in bed and just experience the thoughts, practice allowing them to flow? Martin Reed: I’m curious what your approach was there. Eric Flanders: Yeah, I towards the end, I got a lot better with getting out of bed and I became okay with being awake. And I, when I would get out of bed at first, I would start, I was doing things that were not natural to myself. Right? Because a lot of people just recommend we’ll do something boring, right? Eric Flanders: That’s not super engaging. And that’s exactly what it was. It was super boring and like doing crossword puzzles or word searches or things like that. I would do tons of those things, but that’s not something that I enjoyed. So it made my time awake. Unenjoyable and I was already not enjoying it. And so, I started when I wake up now, I would just turn the TV on, and I know the TV, I would always, I bought blue, the blue sunglasses, right. Eric Flanders: To block out the light from TV thinking, Oh man, the lights just allowing my serotonin is not working. Right. Because, so I started doing all these weird things. I was, I’d be the only person in my house wearing sunglasses at night, watching TV. And Yeah. That obviously didn’t help at all, but I was doing it anyways because I was looking for anything. Eric Flanders: But then now, if I wake up, I just watch TV and I’ll watch a show and then I’ll go lay down again and see if I fall asleep. And I usually do. But most times I’m going to bed with my wife and I’m sleeping pretty quick. Martin Reed: I think really what it comes down to is just that more natural approach, right? Martin Reed: There’s, you move away from the rules and the rituals, whether it’s I have to wear a certain type of glasses or I can’t watch TV. We come up with all these rules and rituals for ourselves, even though if we’re able to reflect back on a time in our lives when sleep wasn’t a concern. Will we engage in those rules and rituals back then? Martin Reed: And if not, maybe that tells us something. Yeah. There’s always some insights to be gleaned there. But, and I love, what I really like was the fact you touched upon a few times during our conversation was there are still some difficult nights from time to time. You’re not some kind of superhuman that’s having a great night of sleep every single night. Martin Reed: What’s different now? I mean, First of all, are you still having some difficult nights from time to time? And if so, what’s different in terms of how you respond to them now and the kind of influence they might have over you? Eric Flanders: Yeah, I you know, I thought you know over the course of my life. I’ve always been an amazing sleeper and But in reality, I was telling myself that when I was going through this not remembering that man Most people don’t sleep great every night and I was not anything out of the normal. Eric Flanders: I, I had nights where I didn’t sleep great, but I totally forgot about that when I was going through it. I was like, I went from zero to nothing or a hundred to nothing here today. I would consider myself. Not having insomnia anymore. That I would absolutely consider, but does that mean I don’t have a night once a week where I’m getting three or four hours versus eight? Eric Flanders: Yeah that absolutely can happen. I don’t give it any attention now, because I know And I’m confident, like I’m going to sleep great probably the next night and usually I do, right? I mean, that’s just what happens, right? Your body knows when to sleep and when not to sleep if you’re not trying to play around with it. Eric Flanders: And so, it’s not abnormal for me to have a rough night and it’s, I wouldn’t even consider it a rough night anymore. I would consider it, it’s just me laying in bed comfortably. I, maybe I’m just not sleeping and that’s totally fine. It’s okay for me now and it the bed is now a comfort for me You know, I enjoy being in there whether i’m awake or not. Eric Flanders: Whereas before it wasn’t and So yeah, it’s not like a you know All of a sudden I had insomnia and then all of a sudden i’m a perfect sleeper again That’s just not the reality of the situation And it could be circumstances Something i’m thinking about the next day right things happen in life where you have something really important the next day and that can keep you up you know There’s all kinds of things and explanations as to why maybe you don’t have a great night of sleep. Eric Flanders: And that’s okay. It’s totally normal. I think that’s what I finally understood is it’s totally normal. Martin Reed: Absolutely. Well, Eric, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and just share your experience and your story and your insights. Great stuff there. I do have one, one last question for you which is a question that’s quite similar to my final question for every guest, so I’m gonna ask you the question too, and it’s this. Martin Reed: If someone with chronic insomnia is listening, and they feel as though they’ve just tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they’ll just never be able to move away from this struggle with sleep, this struggle with insomnia, What would you say to them? Eric Flanders: I would say that I was absolutely right there where they are right now and absolutely believing that there was no hope for me either. Eric Flanders: And I say that from the bottom of my heart because it was, it’s absolutely true and being here today I am very grateful for it because I never thought I would be here today but I would tell anyone who’s sitting there listening to this and really having a hard time that to be, you said, kind to yourself and not beat yourself up over it because, if you could choose not to be in the situation you’re in, you would probably not choose to be there. Eric Flanders: And so it’s not your fault. You’re not doing anything wrong. And to go out and live your life the way you want to live it, no matter how hard it is to just do it. And. Especially do it those nights where it’s rough sleep. Go out the next day and do everything that you planned on doing. Eric Flanders: If you’re avoiding doing things, go do them. And it will be okay. It will be okay. You will, you’ll convince yourself that it’s gonna be okay by showing yourself it’s gonna be okay. Martin Reed: All right. Well, I think that’s a great note to end on. So thanks again, Eric, for taking the time to come onto the podcast. Eric Flanders: Yeah, I appreciate your time, Martin. Have a great night. Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Gerry struggled with sleep for decades. The more he struggled, the more effort he put into sleep and the more effort he put into sleep, the more he struggled. Eventually, Gerry realized that trying to make sleep happen was only making things even more difficult. With this realization, Gerry changed his approach. Instead of trying to force sleep, he practiced being kinder to himself when insomnia showed up. He practiced experiencing wakefulness and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that can come with it with less struggle by being more of an observer of those things rather than an opponent of them. Gerry also practiced mindfulness to help build skill in being more present when insomnia and all the difficult stuff that comes with it tried to sweep him away. Today, Gerry is not only sleeping better but — because he is less tangled up in an ongoing struggle — he is enjoying an improved quality of life. Sleep has become a natural part of his daily routine, rather than a challenge to overcome. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin: Okay, so Gerry, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Gerry: You’re welcome. Glad to be here. Martin: It’s great to have you on. Let’s just start right at the beginning. If you can just tell us a little bit more about when your issues with sleep first began and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep. Gerry: Well, it started when I was 27. I was in my, was it first year? No, second year of law school, and the year before was the first time that trying as hard as I could and not succeeding happened. In other words, I tried really hard, but law school, there’s a lot of really smart people in law school and my grades weren’t that great, and it seems to, in retrospect, have taken about a year to sink in to the point where the insomnia started kicking in. What I’m getting at is that I really started wondering if I was going to make it. No. No, I’m sorry, it actually started the beginning of third year when… Yeah. Yeah, I was actually almost barely on probation for academics, and so I thought, “Oh my God, I could get kicked out. I could fail at this.” And it just really rocked my world. I grew up thinking that I had to produce to be worth keeping around, and when I saw myself not producing, I really wondered where that was going to be going. I was reminded often when I was growing up that you better toe the line or there could be really some serious consequences. I was threatened to be kicked out of the house and whatnot, so things really started to… I really felt like my world was starting to fall apart. I caution people though when I’m talking on the Insomnia Forum, because if they pick up on the fact that that was quite a while ago, and I guess this is a video, you can see I’m pretty far north of 27, I’ll be 72 here in a couple months, and I want to caution people to not think, “Oh my God, I’m going to be condemned to 40 plus years of insomnia.” That’s not the case at all. I just happened to have some really serious childhood trauma I had to deal with and didn’t deal with it for many years, and so there was a lot of excavating that I had to do, so I don’t think anybody that is having a bout of insomnia ought to just totally freak out and think that they’re condemned to the rest of their life like that. In any event, that’s how it started. And then as it turned out, I graduated from law school and got a job and so on, and had some… Got kicked around like everybody does in life, but made it. I just kept plugging away and made it, but the insomnia, as we talked about in the forum, took on a life of its own. And so just because I graduated from law school and got a job didn’t mean it just went away. In any event, that’s how it started. Martin: Did you find that… Obviously you were going through a lot of pressure, there was a lot on your plate, so we often see some sleep disruption connected to that. Did you find that as you were working really hard to try to get through law school, do well in your career, were you also applying that same effort to sleep? Did you feel that you were putting pressure on yourself to fix sleep, to make sleep happen, or was that just purely this mystery byproduct of all the stress that you were under in other areas of your life? Gerry: Oh, I made sleeping better a big project. It took me a long time to get to the point where I realized that trying harder wasn’t going to work. Trying harder in law school… Well, once I focused a little better and used better techniques, the increased effort there helped. Not that I wasn’t trying hard before, but I think it’s clear that trying harder to sleep better just doesn’t work, but yeah, I went through the whole ball of wax. Over the counter medications, seeing doctors. Well, and certainly worrying about it, trying to think my way toward better sleep, trying to rationalize there’s no reason this should be happening. It shouldn’t be happening. Yeah, I tried a lot of things and some of the things worked to some extent, basic sleep hygiene, don’t drink coffee at midnight and whatnot, but in retrospect, I since see it was a wasted effort in this, trying to make a project of getting to sleep. Building a house is one thing, you plan, you got to do the foundation and you got to put the framing, the electrical and whatnot, or hire people that know what they’re doing, but it doesn’t work here. That I know. Martin: And no matter how well you build that house, there might still be an earthquake. Gerry: Well, that’s also true. Yeah. Martin: It’s so interesting hearing you talk about that, that trying, how you made sleep a project, because I think our minds can really play tricks on us. We’ve all got this human brain that’s just wired to problem solve and to look out for us. Its main job is to look out for us. Any obstacles, any threats, whether they’re real, imagined, predicted, even in the past, it’s going to fire up to protect us and troubleshoot, and so when we’re experiencing some sleep disruption, obviously it’s going to fire up and look out for us and give us all these suggestions for things we can do. Let’s research. Let’s try a supplement. Let’s try a medication. Let’s try meditation. Whatever. There’s millions and millions of things that we can try, and I think sometimes we can get a little bit bit trapped, a little bit caught up, a little bit stuck because we can try all these things and listening to our brain that’s generally guided us pretty well through life, so we’re listening to what it’s having to tell us. We try everything it suggests, and our experience might be showing that all these things we’re doing, all these things we’re trying aren’t working, but then our brain is still there being like, “Well, okay, do that stuff again, but try harder.” It runs out of ideas at a certain point, so then we end up putting even more pressure on ourselves doing these things, understandably, that our experience is telling us are keeping us a little bit stuck, but our mind is just like, “Keep doing it. Keep doing it, but try harder.” And then we put even more pressure on ourselves. Was that akin to your own experience? Gerry: Oh, very much so. Yeah, very much so. I don’t know culturally if it’s worldwide, I always thought… I read a while ago that this sort of thing can be a real kicker for Americans that think that maybe the positive side of the American mystique or whatever is a can-do attitude, which can be a good thing. Hey, we can get this done, or maybe I’m just talking about my older generation, whatever. But anyway, I was always brought up with the idea that, hey, we can get this done. And that’s true for a lot of things, but it doesn’t work here. In fact, I think it’s counterproductive because after a while I saw myself as a failure in terms of insomnia. I saw this thing as a monster. It’s way bigger than I am. I can’t deal with it. I’m beat, and that’s not a good place to be. I found at times where I could lapse into a pretty serious depression. I had to deal with that. I had a serious psychiatric disorder as in got hospitalized for it. I checked into a 30-day voluntary inpatient for that, and that helped a lot, but it wasn’t like everything’s peachy keen after that. That was 30 years ago, but what I did find out was ways to recognize it happening, and when it comes to insomnia, what I find is that… And I can still do this, I did this early this morning when I woke up too early. I can find myself… It’s very easy to start going down that rabbit hole and real depressive rumination, and I am pretty well adept at recognizing it now, and I know that… I think that people that find themselves in that space and they just can’t seem to get out of it for a couple weeks and all they can think about is suicide or whatever, it’s definitely a time to get some professional help. But yeah, it can really do a number on you. It really can. Martin: Something you touched upon there is we can be really hard on ourselves when we’re going through this difficult stuff. That brain fires up again and starts telling you, “Well, maybe you’re not trying hard enough. Why can’t you fix this? Why can everyone else make sleep happen but you can’t? You are a failure. You can’t achieve this, you can’t do that.” And that doesn’t really make things any easier, does it? I think it takes effort and intent, intention, real intention to actually be kind to ourselves when all this difficult stuff shows up. Gerry: Yeah, I totally agree. I’ve been reading something about this idea of self-compassion and that ironically, a lot of people that are the more compassionate toward others are hardest on themselves apparently, the research is showing that the… Well, for example, today I find myself looking at the stuff on my plate, we’re doing this podcast and then I’m going to do a choir practice at 6:30. I’m lucky right now I’m retired, so I don’t have as many things on my plate, but still, even if I had more, I would think I would look at, okay, what do I absolutely have to do today? And then try to work with that and then even talk to people that I’m working with that, well, maybe I’m not sleeping that great, but let’s see what we can do. And I don’t feel like I… Well, like anybody, I’ve got a bunch… Even retired, I’ve got a bunch of stuff on a to-do list, but I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t do a whole bunch of it today. That said, I agree with you on your prior comments about don’t let the insomnia rule your life to the point where I’m going to… Oh, I’m just not going to do this, this, or any of those things because I’m just… Well, I have insomnia, therefore I’m just going to drop out of life. It’s a balance of not dropping out, but on the other hand, not working myself to the bone and beating myself up. Yeah, I think it’s just like if you have a really bad cold, maybe you can ease up and be able to have some chicken soup or something that maybe if you’re… I didn’t sleep all that great last night, or even for a few nights, to realize that, hey, I’m going to do the best I can. And that’s it. Just give it your best. But yeah, just don’t beat yourself up. I did that for a long time. I’ve got to get over this. I’ve just got to do this, I’ve got to do this, and then actually, I had migraines even before insomnia, and they probably, for the longest time I didn’t get both on the same day, but after a while, and I think it was probably from beating myself up year to year to year and just getting worn out, after a while I started getting both at the same time and it just makes it worse. Yeah, definitely go easy. Yeah, I’m sorry if I’m rambling. Martin: You’re not rambling at all. It makes my job a lot easier because I prefer to hear my guests talk rather than myself, and I’m sure my audience probably prefers… They’re probably a bit tired of my voice too. If we reflect back on sleep itself, that struggle with sleep, what was an average night like? Was it difficulty falling asleep? Would you just regularly wake up during the night and find it hard to fall back to sleep? It was a combination of both? What was your actual experience with the nights like? Gerry: Oh, my typical one has always been early morning awakening. I generally just about always can get to sleep right away and then try not to watch the clock too much, but over the years, it looks like if I’d wake up after about four hours, three to four… Well, about four, maybe four and a half, and then not be able to get back to sleep. And last night it was a little bit more than that, I probably got about three hours, but yeah, it’s definitely early morning awakening, which I know is a clinical sign of depression. I think for me, I don’t see myself as really depressed anymore, but I think maybe… I’m not a neurologist or anything, but I suspect that there’s probably a neural pathway that got ground in there that some people are predisposed to whatever little ailment. Maybe mine is just predisposed to this. Sometimes it’s just not going to sleep, maybe it’s just a bad habit I picked up and I obviously rather wasn’t there anymore, but I don’t have to make a huge deal out of it. And sometimes I can recognize that there was a situational insomnia, last night I woke up… Sometimes I’ll wake up and realize there’s really something on my mind, and last night it was a… I’ve had a couple of social events that got canceled just because of any COVID outbreaks, and I was just bummed out about that a little bit. And then you think, “Okay, well, I’ll resolve that,” but then now I’m awake and then… But I try not to… One thing I learned over the years is just don’t toss, and for me, I just don’t toss and turn and go, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I… Why can’t I get back to sleep?” And just staying there. I just get up and go downstairs and play guitar quietly and not wake up my wife, hopefully. Martin: It sounds like there’s difference in your approach there, so now maybe you’re doing something else with that time when you’re awake instead of tossing and turning. Gerry: Yeah, it went back and forth because I thought, “Well, gee, if you get too efficient, I might think, “Gee, this is my time. I think I’m going to automatically wake up now so I can have this quiet time.” But I don’t think that’s been an issue. Instead, for me, it’s been… I felt better during the day knowing that… Not to sound too accomplishment-oriented to an extreme, but well, I use the example of guitar. For me, I really want to learn it, and I’ve found that to really get there, for me, there’ve got to be times when I’ve got to do it even though I don’t want to. And so if I can get some time in during the morning, great, and okay, okay, okay, if I didn’t get enough sleep and I do it, then fine. But I just feel better by say, here we are mid-morning, and I just feel better that I played earlier rather than just stare out the window and mope about how I can’t sleep and my life is shit and just spinning nowhere. And that would just make it worse, so I feel better just getting up and doing stuff. Martin: What’s the difference here? Back when you were still really tangled up in the struggle, how was your approach different then? You mentioned tossing and turning and battling with your mind, things like that. How would you respond to that wakefulness in the past, and how is that different to how you generally respond to it now? Gerry: Well, back then, for a long time, I think of all those years, slow learner I guess, but I saw it… Well, I was working, and so I had to keep my job, do the best I could to do that, and so I saw it as more of a endurance contest. And I was in my late 20s, 30s, 40s, and I guess had more energy than I do now, but I just saw it as something I just got to suck up and just get done. And now I find myself a little bit more easy going about it, and that’s not always the case. I can find myself reverting back to letting the thoughts just go crazy and the thoughts will just be zipping through there about the more negative ones, and I’ve got to get over this and that sort of thing. But for the most part, I’ve gotten to just more of a place of… I don’t want to say giving up with it, but living with it like… Oh, I don’t know. Well, maybe it’s akin to… I got a little bit of arthritis and instead of just giving up and saying, “Well, I just can’t deal with this,” and, “Oh my God, this hurts,” just getting up and doing the best you can and just not letting it run my life. Martin: Would you say that’s acknowledgement, acknowledging the presence of stuff that turns up that’s really difficult? Maybe acknowledging difficult stuff that we can’t control rather than getting tangled up trying to control the difficult stuff that we wish was gone, but we probably realize that we can’t directly control it? At least maybe our experience suggests that. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yeah. I think I’ve gotten to more, not giving up on it or anything like that, but more of a, well, life’s difficult. Everybody’s got something. My foot’s sore sometimes from arthritis. Well, what are you going to do? I have that attitude, so like, “Well, what are you going to do?” Martin: I think this is sometimes where we can get a bit tripped up when we hear the word acceptance because it’s quite easy to confuse acceptance with just throwing in the towel, giving up on everything, admitting defeat, resignation. But really I think acceptance in some circumstances can be quite empowering, quite liberating, because it can free us from a struggle. For example, if we have something that we can’t really control, let’s say for example, arthritis, like you mentioned, we can either throw in the towel and withdraw from life and cancel everything that adds meaning to our life and really try somehow to battle it, to fix it, which might to some extent be helpful, but at the same time, it probably can’t be directly solved just by our own efforts. Acceptance might just involve just accepting that there is going to be some difficult stuff that we cannot control, so it’s more to do with accepting that there’s stuff out there that’s difficult that we can’t control rather than just accepting this is something I have to suffer with. And I think that’s the difference. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And also, I don’t want to get into this ongoing constant battle with arthritis or insomnia or something where it just runs my life. Martin: And I think it’s so linked to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, about that kindness, as being kind to ourselves too, in addition to accepting that this is present, that we might not be able to control it, being kind to ourselves and not being mean to ourselves and making it even more difficult. Gerry: Yeah, I agree. Totally. Yeah. And I have to remind myself about that, being kind to yourself. I tell that to other people, but I have to remind myself. Martin: You mentioned that back in the day when things were really difficult, lots of tossing and turning when you’d wake during the night, lots of pressure, putting pressure on yourself to sleep. Our brains make that link, especially if we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform during the day, we make this link, I’ve got to perform well at night, I’ve got to sleep well in order to perform well during the day. And that’s one of those intentions or efforts that can make things more difficult because as you know from experience, sleep doesn’t respond well to effort. The more we try to make it happen, the more difficult it usually becomes. Something we touched upon earlier, and that I’m keen to explore with you a little bit further, is that role of that brain, that human brain and all the thoughts and the feelings it can generate. And this is one reason why I really wanted to get you on the podcast, is you’re so active in the forum, offering some great advice and support to other people out there, and a common theme that you talk about is this role of our thoughts and how when we’re struggling, all these difficult thoughts and feelings are going to turn up. And although we can’t really control those thoughts and feelings, they’re going to show up no matter what, we can choose how we respond to them. And I think that’s key really because our response to them determines whether we are engaged in a workable response or an unworkable response. What have you found is a workable way of responding to all the difficult thoughts and feelings that can show up during and even after difficult nights? Gerry: What I found over time was that indeed they’re just thoughts, and so all those thoughts those are branches going by in the river and just sitting by the riverbank and just watching them go. They’re not pleasant, but just watching them drift on by. Instead of jumping in the river and trying to wrestle with them and try to work them out and try to rationalize with them. It’s just drifting on by. I can acknowledge the thought, I don’t deny it, but I don’t have to react to it. I don’t have to freak out about it all over again for the 50 millionth time. And I still have times where I goof and forget that and go down the thought train and I might find myself in the river and going around the bend and then I hit a log and then realize, “Oh, whoa, here I am in the river.” And then I get out of the river and try to dry myself off and go, “Okay, well, that was a bummer, but we’re through that and we realized that happened a long time ago, and here we are right now and I’m going to get on my bike later today.” Or we got a fun project at work to do, and that’s going right now. Let’s go with that. Martin: What your response comes down to, if I just were to sum it up, is it started with acknowledging so you acknowledge the presence of that thought rather than just immediately trying to push it away or trying to avoid it from even turning up in the first place. Being more of an observer of it, being maybe a little bit more curious about its presence rather than putting on a big suit of armor in its presence and being kind to yourself in return, because a lot of this stuff is really difficult. I think you’ve touched upon this in the past that when you first hear this phrase from all the gurus that thoughts are just thoughts, it can be quite offensive because these thoughts are difficult and they’re real. But when we practice and when we practice acknowledging them, observing them and being kind to them, we can get a little bit distance from those thoughts so we can recognize that they are there, they are present, but that’s what they are, they’re thoughts. They’re separate from us, they aren’t us. They’re thoughts that we’re experiencing. Gerry: Yeah, I’ve gotten to the point now where I’m pretty good at not getting into the, oh, I’m going to get rid of that thought because that’s a conscious thought that I can recognize fairly quickly that no, that’s not going to work. But as far as getting caught up in thoughts, that can still happen for sure. If it’s just really powerful, you just get gobsmacked, and I have ones that just will just wham, even from years ago. All of a sudden it just hits that hard and it can take a while. Maybe it’s akin to being in a martial arts match or boxing or something, and man, you just get hit and for a second there you’re not really sure what’s going on. And so it can rock my world a little bit, but I find that with some practice it’s not too long. I might find myself in that river, but not in the river too long before I go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, this isn’t working. I’m getting jacked around here.” Yeah. Martin: Yeah, that is such an important point, I’m really glad you made it, that none of us get to, I don’t think at least that anyone gets to this guru level where we don’t deal with difficult thoughts, where we don’t get caught up in the struggle with them again. Even if we are practicing for years moving away from struggling with them, every now and then we are going to find ourselves dropping into that river, as you put it, getting swept away, and I think that’s normal part of being a human being. What matters is the more we practice, the more we’re able to notice when that’s happening, and… Maybe not the easier it is, but the more skill we have in noting when it’s happening and refocusing our attention and bringing ourselves back so we don’t quite get tangled up in that big struggle quite so fast. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah, I think if anybody’s thinking, if I can just get to the point I have total serenity, I’m going to be at total peace, I’m going to sleep well, nothing’s going to ever bother me, no, that’s not going to happen. Not on this earth. I’ve never met the Dalai Lama, but I doubt very much he would say that everything is just peachy keen for me all the time. Martin: It’s really interesting because as human beings, I don’t know whether we are hardwired or it’s culturally ingrained upon us, just this pursuit of happiness, we should be happy all of the time. We shouldn’t feel fear, we shouldn’t feel worry, anxiety, stress, anger, frustration, so we’re taught that we should only experience one emotion, one feeling, and that everything else, that implies that everything else that comes with being a human being, all the other thoughts, feelings and emotions are somehow wrong, that we have to get rid of them. We are hardwired to struggle with all this difficult stuff, so it does take a lot of practice to understand or to acknowledge or just to realize that that’s normal, being a human being, doing things that matter comes with difficult thoughts, feelings and emotions. Happiness is just a transitory state and we can’t reach any moments of happiness without some struggle along the way. Gerry: Yeah, true. I think that’s true. Martin: I think that’s a great summary of your changing your relationship with your thoughts. One from where there was understandably that big attempt to control, to fight, to avoid, which consumes all of our energy, our focus and attention, and can make things more difficult, more to a place where we practice, maybe not always achieve, but we practice acknowledging our thoughts, being more of an observer of them, being kind to ourselves when they show up, and responding to them in a way that’s maybe more workable. Where we do things that matter to us even when they’re present. And these don’t have to be huge things. They’re just things that are important to us that represent who we are, who we want to be, kind of life we want to live. Because I think with repeated practice, when we just continue to do that, then we’re still living the life we want to live even when this difficult stuff is present, and that in turn might help reduce the influence of all this difficult stuff, or at least reduce the focus of all that difficult stuff. It’s like looking at our difficulties through a magnifying glass. It’s hard to see anything else when we are looking through a magnifying glass. If you can practice putting the magnifying glass down, that stuff we were looking at is still there, but now we’ve got this whole field of vision around us and we might recognize that there’s more available to us, more things to do and more that makes up our world than just what was once visible through that magnifying glass. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think it’s so easy to get too focused on stuff, maybe too much media consumption or social media or something, just getting down a rabbit hole of negativity or getting on Instagram or Facebook or whatever where it looks like everybody’s just… Everyone else is just doing great when they’re all probably looking at it thinking everybody else is just doing great, and I’m not. These illusions, and maybe there’s something in our culture that’s like, “Well, I should be happier, or what’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with everything that I’m not happy?” And well, there’s good and evil in the world, and it’s a hard world. It’s also a beautiful world, and I can acknowledge both. Martin: Something else that can maybe set us up for a little bit more difficulty with the difficulties that come with being a human being is the kind of sharing culture that we have mainly online, so like social media, social networks and stuff where we have friends or acquaintances and we’re scrolling through our feed and everyone’s posting pictures of themselves smiling on vacation or with their kids or with a new car. And everyone’s obviously posting content that reflects happiness or where they would like to be in life, but the truth is that can lead to a bit of a distorted view, like you touched upon. We can then believe that everyone around us has got this great life, they’re not dealing with any struggles, there’s no pain or difficulty just because it’s constantly reinforced through where a lot of us spend a lot of our time on these devices. We’re just seeing everyone else that we know having this great life, but the truth is no one really posts about their struggles and all the difficult stuff. We generally post when we’re having a good time. Gerry: They’re not telling you about the surly kid at home or getting laid off or the hassles at the grocery store, and I can’t find this or that, or my car broke down, but it’s all happening. Martin: Yeah, exactly. It’s all happening behind the scenes, and I think that… I wonder if that might even just be an act of self-kindness, just recognizing that it’s not unusual or abnormal to be finding things difficult. It’s almost a guarantee that everyone you interact with each day is dealing with their own struggles too. I don’t think there’s anyone out there that’s got a perfect life, 100% happiness I don’t think is an achievable feat. Gerry: No. Martin: One thing that I think that might be a bit of a theme to what we’ve been talking about, and I’m curious to hear your take on this because it’s something you’ve mentioned a few times in the Insomnia Coach Forum, is mindfulness. And you touched upon sometimes it can feel like it’s a bit of a fad, even though it’s actually been around for a long time and a lot of people have some confusion about it as a result, like what is mindfulness? What does it mean? What’s the goal of it? Can you tell us about what you feel mindfulness is and how it’s helped you? Gerry: I think mindfulness has to do with just being aware of the present moment, and by itself, it just sounds kind of weird. I even have a friend who’s a mental health therapist herself, but she just thinks, “Ooh, that just sounds woo woo, and what’s that got to do with anything?” Just the fact that I’m aware of that this fingertip is touching this thumb or something like that. What’s that got to do with anything? But the best thing I can think of is, well, you can either be focused on the present or the past or the future, and so where are you going to be? I can be ruminating about the past or reliving the past a lot, not to say you don’t think about memory sometimes, but I can live in the past or I can be in the future. And there’s lots of ways to get anxious about that because we don’t know what’s going to happen, and meanwhile, miss the present. Oh, it’s been attributed to John Lennon, probably some other people too, but life is what’s happening while you’re busy making other plans, and there’s just a lot going on in present life, and so for me, what I try to do is, yeah, I do some practice, listen to some meditation tapes. I’ve got some favorite sites and I have sometimes listed some, and I tell people that if you get on there and you find somebody you’re just not really… It’s just not working for you. Don’t just say, “Well, to hell with mindfulness.” No. Instead, just look around and… It’s almost like music, such and such musician, you resonate more with this artist or that. But it’s just a way of just appreciating the present. Like right now, I’m just looking out over the screen here and seeing this beautiful flower in our yard, and I’m not going to leave our podcast now and just focus totally on that, but I’m just noticing that just for a second. When it comes down to the actual practice, it’s really trying to just be aware of what’s going on right now, whether it’s my body or what thoughts are going through in my mind. I’m not trying to force anything out, I’m not trying to think happy thoughts, I’m just being aware, and it’s hard to put in words. It’s almost like I found this… I even have a note in my dresser and it refers to both mindfulness and guitar. I can think about it, watch videos about it, read about it, talk about it, or I can do it, and at some point it comes down to just doing it and to really try to get a feel for what it can bring. For me, what it brings is, especially in difficult moments, realizing that, okay, what’s going on right now is I have to do maybe X, but it doesn’t mean I have to do X, Y, Z and everything all at… Life doesn’t have to be a flood that I have to deal with everything right now, just what’s going on right now. Life doesn’t seem so as overwhelming, I can say that, and life can also be more fuller. Instead of driving home and realizing that I can’t really tell you a thing that I’ve seen from point A to point B and getting home and not even realizing anything, instead just being able to appreciate where I am or even little basic things, like I can find that I really appreciate the fact that I’m healthy, that I can move, that I own this car. Martin: Where I feel that mindfulness can be really helpful, just as you described, is our minds like to time travel, so I’ll just use one of my own examples. Kind of like yesterday, had a lot of podcasts to prepare for, I had to call the bank, I had to do all the other stuff that comes with being a parent, working, being a human being, and I felt the heart racing. I felt really tight and stressed, and that’s because really what my mind was doing, it wasn’t focusing on, okay, right now I have to work on this. It was thinking, “Oh, but then I’ve got to do this, this, this, this, this.” I was getting stressed about something that hasn’t happened yet, it’s in the future, so it doesn’t even exist. And the fact of the matter is the task that I was working on at that moment is the same task whether I had 20 other things to do after it or zero things to do after it, but if there were zero things to do after it, I would be doing that task, just my mind would be traveling thinking, “Oh, I can relax after this, do whatever I want,” but instead my mind was like, “Oh, but then you’ve got to do this, this, this, this, this, this.” And one thing that mindfulness can help us do is keep us a little bit more present or at least to notice when our mind starts to time travel and bring us back to the present, help refocus our attention. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I can give you an example of my own. Lately I’ve found that I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll wake up, my mouth will be kind of dry, my neck is a little sore, and so I go in the other room and I lay down and I find, and I just… Okay, I am awake and I’m walking into the other room and I’m laying down, and now I’m stretching my neck to the left, now I’m stretching to the right, and instead of ruminating, oh my God, I wonder if I’ll get back to sleep, what’s going to be like tomorrow? When’s this ever going to end, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Instead, I find myself just focusing on the present and with practice I find that I can do this a little bit more, not always perfectly, but just stretching this way and then going back to bed and then laying there and realize, “Okay, I’m just laying here and I’m just breathing.” I can feel myself breathing. I can feel the pillow. Totally in the present. And I’m just going to do this and just do that instead of, oh my God, I wonder if I’ll get back to sleep. And it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I don’t get back to sleep and it’s like, “Oh, well, I wish I did, but okay.” And then just focusing on, okay, now I’m going to get up and I’m going to do this, and just being… Yeah, and just… It’s nothing really fancy or earth-shattering or anything, it’s just… Yeah, it’s just like where are you going to be? Are you going to be in the present, the past or the future? You pick. Martin: And the mind still wanders anyway, right? Gerry: Oh yeah. Martin: Especially if we are new to this practice, so we might be like, “Okay, this sounds like something I could try and experiment with,” so next time, let’s say whether you’re lying in bed or if it’s just a moment during the day when you’re getting really distracted or you find your mind time traveling- Gerry: Yeah, my mind will be wandering, like I say, when I’m stretching there or I’m laying back in bed, the thought might be going through my mind and I’ll find myself saying, “Oh, I’m having the thought that I might not get back to sleep, and it’s just going to be a real bummer, and…” Well, there’s the thought going by and then try not to glob onto that thought, just let it drift on by. Martin: It comes down to that control. The mind is still going to wander off. What we are doing is just looking to practice bringing it back to the present again, because it’s always going to drift off to the future or the past away from right now. Gerry: Yeah, and don’t beat yourself up when it wanders, like, “Oh my God, I’m really a bad meditator. What a flop I am.” No, it’s going to do that. Our minds wander for reasons that drive us crazy like we’ve been talking about, or they can lead to really creativity. I read somewhere where the guy that came up with what, silicon chips or something, it’s just the idea popped into his head when he was taking a shower. What kind of thought that was, I have the slightest idea how anybody could think of that, but apparently he wasn’t consciously thinking about it, he was just taking a shower and all of a sudden this idea popped into his head, so go figure. Martin: Going back to these themes of mindfulness where you said one of them is the time traveling, being more present, noticing when our mind is time traveling, just bringing it back to the present moment with kindness and recognizing that just because you brought it back once, it doesn’t mean it’s going to stay there. It’s going to drift off, especially if you’re new to this. This is a skill and no one ever is able to keep their mind anchored 100% percent in the present 100% of the time. It is something that requires ongoing practice, but another benefit you touched upon or another part of mindfulness, another benefit of mindfulness is the brain likes to run on autopilot a lot of the time. You gave the example like if we’re driving a car. We can just be driving along, before we know it half an hour has gone by, we can’t remember what the speed limit is. When we are noticing ourselves on autopilot, we miss out on stuff, and so when things are difficult, when we’re struggling, it can feel as though that’s the only thing that’s present. But like you just mentioned, you’d notice just in the background, out the window there was this beautiful flower. These things can seem quite small and insignificant, but the more skill we can gain through practice of just noticing the good stuff around us, disengaging autopilot when we find that we’re doing stuff without really thinking about it, can really open us up to more of the good stuff that’s also present even when the difficult stuff is present with us too. Gerry: Yeah, you’re going to be having a really tough day and gulping down coffee and not really noticing it or be having a really tough day, but still noticing, wow, this coffee tastes really good, so at least there’s a little bit of bright spot if you can notice it. But it’s there. It’s there. Martin: And it’s amazing what’s out there, and I think children are great at this. Children are experts in this. They want to… You take a child out for a walk, they want to look at every rock, look at every leaf, and there are limits to this. As adults, we do still have to get stuff done, we can’t just be walking around in a philosophy of amazement, wonder and curiosity all of the time, but maybe if we can just take a little bit of that childhood magic with us and just stop every now and then and just notice what’s around us. Is there anything we’re missing out on? Gerry: And not to mention learning from kids, relearning from kids about sleep because kids are doing all that stuff and then after a while they just conk out. They don’t sit and think, “Well, I really hope I can get to sleep,” or, “What should I do to sleep?” And thinking it through and… They just conk out. Martin: Exactly. Yeah, there is a lot, and as a parent, I learn a lot from my kids every single day. It is quite amazing how much of those childhood insights we lose as we get older. We obviously gain a lot, but we also can lose a lot as well. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah. Martin: Well, Gerry, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken out your day to come on. I really like the way we really dug into the thought processes that can be involved when we are struggling with insomnia and how we can easily get caught up in a battle with them that can make things maybe more difficult and how there is an alternative approach that can help us move away from the struggle, but that’s that’s not something that’s easy. It does require ongoing practice and just being kind to yourself when things are difficult. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening to this conversation, listening to your great insights that you’ve shared, but they feel like I’m that person, I’ve tried everything, I’m just beyond help, I’m just never going to be able to move away from struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them? Gerry: Right now you’re having these thoughts that I’m stuck, I’m never going to get better. I realize that’s a really powerful thought and I can understand where you would be coming from, how that thought would develop and lodge into your brain because of all, unfortunate, the suffering you’ve had. But I can’t emphasize enough that the thought is powerful, I totally acknowledge that, but as hard as it might seem to acknowledge, I can tell you the thought is not true. It’s not true. You’re not stuck, you’re not condemned to it. Going back to that thing about the kid that conks out. Over time, if you don’t eat… You’re not hungry right now, say, but over time, eventually you’re going to get hungry and over time you’re going to fall asleep. If you say, “I just can’t sleep, I can’t sleep,” well, you will acknowledge that you can’t just get in your car and try to drive across the United States. And you know eventually you’re going to fall asleep at the wheel. And so the things that say I can’t sleep, your brain is… I know that’s a powerful thought, but it’s simply not true, and if you can try to give yourself a break, maybe realize that, hey, I’ve really been working hard on this, I’ve really been trying, but maybe if I can not take my thoughts so seriously, even though they seem like they must be true because they’re so powerful, but if I can acknowledge that sleep is a natural process and that therefore something is getting in the way, and you know what, it could be that the thing that’s in my way is my thinking that I can’t sleep, that I am stuck, that there’s nothing I can do, that I’m a failure, that this is my life and my life is hell, and I wish I was dead and so on and so on. Believe me, I’ve been there and it’s easier said than done, and no, it’s not perfect, and like I said earlier in the podcast, turned out I didn’t sleep that great last night, but hang in there and also realize you’re not alone. A lot of it, there’s millions any given night. Last night probably in the US alone, there was probably what, 20, 30 million people easy that didn’t sleep that well. A lot of us are walking around kind of blitzed, we could use some more sleep. You’re not alone, and this isn’t a death sentence or a life sentence to insomnia. Things can get better. I would really urge you to stick with… Well, the Insomnia Forum, and see what people are going through and get some tips and share some ideas, and Martin’s podcasts, emails and whatnot. And things can get better. If this sounds like just some sort of goody two shoes pep talk, it’s not. We all have different journeys, but on the other hand, there are some similarities, and I think that I’ve got a pretty good idea what your… In this part of your journey, I got a pretty good idea what that is like because it’s tough, it is tough. And maybe also give yourself credit. Here you are, you’re still here, and you’re not alone. You’re not alone. Martin: I think that’s a great note to end on, Gerry, so thank you again for taking the time to come out onto the podcast and to share your thoughts, your insights, and your experiences. Really appreciated. Gerry: Well, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Martin: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

As a business owner, Anne-Claire began overextending herself and her sleep started to suffer. She reduced her workload and experimented with supplements and medication but her sleep seemed to get even worse. After deciding that she didn’t want to continue using medication, Anne-Claire began to explore whether changing her approach to sleep and her response to insomnia might be helpful. Like most people, Anne-Claire had tried to fight or avoid the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with insomnia — and this got her tangled up in more of a struggle with them. In a change of approach, Anne-Claire began making space for them to exist. She would greet and welcome her thoughts (even the difficult ones). She practiced being more of an observer of them, rather than an opponent of them. As she did that she realized that many of the thoughts her mind generated didn’t match her own experience. This helped her realize that there was no need to battle with her mind — that her mind will generate all kinds of thoughts and feelings, some of which might be true, some of which might not be true. Some of which might be helpful and some of which might not be helpful. As she started to implement and practice new habits, Anne-Claire also realized that the more effort she put into sleep, the more difficult it became. She found that by maintaining a consistent out of bed time in the morning, regardless of how she slept, she was better able to do things that mattered and she was more likely to experience better sleep on subsequent nights. She also discovered that comparing her sleep to anyone else’s or trying to achieve a certain amount or type of sleep was not helpful and was likely to pull her back into a struggle. Today, Anne-Claire no longer struggles with sleep. Thanks to her willingness to experience insomnia, sleep has — once again — become effortless. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay. Anne-Claire, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Anne-Claire France: My pleasure. My pleasure. Very much. Martin Reed: Can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep? Anne-Claire France: I think they began right around 2015, and I think the primary cause was, I’m kind of an overachiever. And I run my own business and I overextended myself and had way too much going on. And so I, in order to be able to meet my standards of what I wanted to do for my clients, I was doing a lot of long nighters, all-nighters, all that kind of stuff. And I’m an analytical type of person, so I was always thinking about what was going on and not really taking a lot of time to give my mind a break. Even when I was trying to rest. So I think a lot of the time while I was in that sort of overextended time period, I was just almost recalibrating my body clock. And without knowing that I was doing that. And then when it was sort of waning, I just wasn’t able to get back onto something normal. And of course life intervenes all the time. So you start thinking about lots of stuff and I was just sort of hyperaroused more than I probably should have been. And so that just carried on for quite some time and then I realized I probably needed to be doing something different. I’ve always been a light sleeper, but I could sleep. And so sound would bother me and things like that. But that was easy to take care of. But no matter what was going on, I usually would get enough sleep and I was not one to think, oh, I need 12 hours or 8 hours. It was just, what do I need to feel good? And I’d say that… I mean, I did certainly have some sleep issues probably in 2010, 2011. So when I went through menopause. There was all those kinds of physiological things that were going on, but I could attribute them to that. And then in about 2015, as I mentioned, when I really overextended myself and was just burning the midnight oil all the time and not really resting and keeping my mind going all the time, and then being sort of the one people look to in the family to solve all that as well. I mean, it was just sort of go, go, go. And I just felt like I needed to be doing all those things and really neglected being on any sort of set schedule other than accomplish, accomplish, accomplish. And so once all that sort of died down a little bit and I could really get back onto more of a regular schedule, I think I had completely recalibrated my body clock. And I didn’t understand what all that meant. And so when it was time to sleep and I was still thinking about things or, why can’t I sleep? Which would also require me to be thinking more about, well, what do I need to do in order to sleep? Which of course wasn’t helpful at all to be doing anything to try to fall asleep. And I did try several things by the time I reached out to you, I believe in 2020. Martin Reed: There’s lots of great stuff there. Just to unpack it a little bit. It sounds like you kind of attribute a lot of the initial sleep disruption to that really busy, stressful lifestyle that some of us have. And that also I think some of us are just that high achiever personality. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform all the time. What we would usually expect to see, if we weren’t talking about insomnia, we were just talking about life and stress and all that stuff that gets in the way is when we’re able to take a step back and maybe a little bit less of burning the candle at both ends, then everything will get back on track again. We can just expect sleep to just kind of take over and go back to the good old days the way it was. But as you were describing, when you were able to take a step back and have less pressure in your life, the sleep kind of didn’t seem to get on track. Did I hear you right? Was that what your experience was like? Anne-Claire France: That’s correct. That’s correct. And so I felt like I probably needed to go see somebody. Or there’s something wrong with me. Or something like that. And so I went to see my primary care physician who also does a lot of homeopathic types of things. And so she said, “Well, let’s try some supplements.” And things like that. And I can’t even tell you. I mean, there was the usuals like melatonin and stuff, and valerian. And there were some other ones that didn’t work at all. But I think in looking back, I was sort of putting all my hope in the particular supplement in sort of being something like magic. As opposed to me making any changes in my behavior. And so that went on for some time, which was very frustrating. And then I ended up getting to the point where I was so sleep deprived, I mean, really sleep deprived. There were many nights I would go with zero hours. And so I said, I really do need to have something that’ll help me sleep. And so we moved to sleep medication, which I was not happy about at all. But again, it was really more relying on something external as opposed to me making any behavior changes. Martin Reed: I think it’s a well-trodden path that you just described. Something that a lot of people identify with because going back to what we were talking about earlier, often we can recognize that when sleep disruption first shows up, maybe there’s an identifiable or obvious cause. Sometimes we can control that cause, sometimes we can’t. But we kind of understandably believe that once that trigger, that cause is no longer present or relevant, then everything will get back on track. And normally it does. But in the case of insomnia, sometimes it doesn’t. And that can make it feel really mysterious and unique and unusual and lead to a lot of confusion and worry and anxiety and all the difficult stuff that comes with that concern that we’ve got about our sleep. The truth is there’s never really any mystery to it, to insomnia. And from person to person, it’s almost identical from person to person. And it often comes down to the change in our approach to sleep once we’re experiencing that sleep disruption. And sometimes we get caught up in this change without even realizing it or we are just completely approaching sleep completely differently. Understandably, because we see it as a problem that we want to fix. So we engage in some changes, behavioral changes, maybe our thoughts about sleep have changed as well. And it’s all those changes that we understandably adopt in response to that sleep disruption that are almost like opening that oxygen valve to insomnia and just supplying it with the oxygen that it needs to survive. When you talked about going down that route of exploring supplements and talking about medication and things like that, you touched upon the fact that now you’re able to look back and recognize that your behaviors had changed in a way that maybe wasn’t helpful. But at the time, had you noticed that your behaviors had changed? Had you noticed that your approach to sleep had changed when you were kind of tangled up in that struggle? Or did it just all seem very mysterious still? Anne-Claire France: It really was very mysterious. And to be honest, I wondered if it was more about the aging process. Maybe my body is changing and a lot of us think about, “Oh, I wish I could do what I did when I was younger.” Blah, blah, blah, all that kind of thing. And I thought about that. And I thought, well, maybe this is just part of the normal aging process. People talk about when you get older you don’t need that much sleep. But I certainly did realize you need some, which I wasn’t getting. But what really occurred to me is that, and what was afforded to me when COVID hit, and we were in essentially lockdown as I thought, I can now pay attention to me and really take a look at what is going on here. And so I wanted to completely get off any kind of non… I wanted to get off any kind of pharmaceutical mechanism to help me with my sleep. I wanted to do something different about it. And so I started reading a lot more and really discovered this whole idea of cognitive behavioral therapy. And being a scientist myself, I really enjoy reading about that kind of stuff and realized, well, maybe I can talk to somebody who really knows what kind of therapy we’re talking about here. So I did go see someone in person in my hometown. And for a couple of sessions to really learn more about it. And realized that the type of behavioral changes that were going to be required that I know you’ve talked about like sleep restriction and the stimulus control wasn’t anything that I had ever thought of before. It was almost counterintuitive. And of course gathering the data and all that. But I certainly realized that I had potential. And as long as I was willing to learn about myself and learn about what was going on with me with some help from someone, that I would be able to have those changes. And whether the sleep was like it was when I was younger didn’t matter to me as long as it was enough for whatever I needed to be doing and feel good. That’s what I went for. So I actually looked around for a coach. And I discovered Insomnia Coach. And I thought, I want a coach because a coach will really help me learn about the potential I have. And unleash all that. As opposed to saying, “Here’s what you have to do.” It’s really more, “Here’s what the potential is and I can help you get there.” And so that’s when I reached out to you in December of 2020. Martin Reed: In terms of what that sleep was like when it was still difficult for you, were you finding it was difficulty just kind of first falling asleep or was it more to do with you fall asleep fine and then just wake up and find it impossible to fall back to sleep? Or maybe it was a bit of both. Anne-Claire France: It was primarily just falling asleep. And then as I’m sure everyone who has had any kind of insomnia issues, if you will, or in their life knows, if you find yourself having trouble falling asleep, you get anxious about it, which of course makes it even more difficult to fall asleep. And then you become such that even the thought of having to go to bed to go to sleep is anxiety producing. So you sort of, just that whole idea of even trying to be a normal sleeper… And of course I’m married to someone who can sleep anywhere. So that was tough. It’s like, oh, I wish I could do that. And of course, I have a cat who sleeps like 23 hours a day. Was even envying the cat. So it was primarily falling asleep. And so there would be nights where I would have zero hours. But what was very interesting is that even when I had zero hours of sleep, it didn’t really keep me from doing what I needed to do during the day. Although I would worry about that. That, oh, if I don’t get enough sleep, then I won’t be able to do X, Y, Z. But that really wasn’t the case. I mean, I was definitely tired and maybe didn’t have quite as much energy, but I didn’t realize until much later after having my sort of online conversations with you and going through the course that it is the case that most people can do a lot of things without a lot of sleep. But I wasn’t really recognizing that as being a good thing. It was really more of a, wow, I can still do this, but I’m still worried and anxious about not being able to sleep even though I was functioning pretty well. Martin Reed: Yeah, that’s interesting you say that. Were you finding that even though when you recalled your own experience and were like, “Well, yeah, I can still do these things that are important, that matter to me independently of sleep.” Were you finding that your brain was still maybe telling you other things that were different to your own experience? Maybe your brain was telling you things like, “You won’t be able to do those things.” Or, “You’ll really struggle to do those things.” Even though your experience told you something different? Anne-Claire France: Yes, and… In that, yes, it would tell me that, but then if I did make a slight error or something like that, my brain would always say, “Oh, that’s because you didn’t get enough sleep.” Not because it was just some normal thing that anyone might make, but it was always the reason for anything that was not quite the outcome I wanted was attributed to potentially not getting enough sleep. Which could have or may not have had anything to do with that. So yeah, my brain was right in there letting me know that my sleep issues were… It was telling me it was probably more of a problem than it actually was. Martin Reed: I think that’s one of those places where we can really get tripped up when the brain starts kind of firing up, doing its job and looking out for us and generating all these full range of thoughts and feelings. Some are helpful, some are not helpful. Some make us feel good, some don’t make us feel good. And when those difficult ones show up, because they don’t feel good, I think as human beings, our default response tends to be to try and fight them or avoid them. Because they don’t feel good. We recognize that they’re not helping us. We just want to get rid of them. And that’s what can really kind of tangle us up in a big struggle with the mind that can make everything more difficult. Because the brain then is doing its job, looking out for us, and we are trying to fight what it’s doing. Or we’re trying to avoid or trying to ignore or push all that information away and then the brain is like, “This is important. Why are you not listening to me? I’m going to yell even louder.” And then we’re trying to fight it even more. And then it’s yelling even louder and we just get caught so easily in that vicious cycle. Where we experience more of that difficult stuff, more difficult thoughts and feelings. So we fight even harder to get rid of it. And then that stuff gets even harder and we fight harder and before we know it, we’re completely exhausted, completely distracted from everything around us and the things we want to do. And what happens? The thoughts still come back anyway, right? So really what can be useful is, which I’m sure we’re going to move on to discussing is, figuring out a way where we can break that cycle. Where we can respond to all this difficult stuff that our mind is telling us maybe in a more workable way. In a way that doesn’t involve so much struggle. Because as most of us know from experience, that stuff’s going to show up anyway. What if we don’t add the struggle on top? Maybe that might make things just a little bit easier to deal with or a little bit better, help us feel a little bit better, if we just imagine that our brain is on the other end of a rope and we’re engaged in this huge tug of war battle.. What if we just kind of drop that rope? So all that stuff is still there, but now we’ve just freed up so much of our energy and our attention because we’re not just tugging on that rope all day long and all night long. Maybe now we’ve freed up to do more of the stuff that matters to us. Was that a journey that you found yourself on? Just responding to all the stuff that your mind was telling you maybe in a different way? Anne-Claire France: Yeah, for sure. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about, well, these are just thoughts and they’re transient and it’s not like the thoughts are going to do anything harmful to me. And certainly as you mentioned, it became such that if I would spend energy in trying to eliminate those thoughts, then it just became more of that struggle. And so I just decided that I need to be willing to accept that I have these thoughts and they’re just thoughts. And so I actually started doing guided meditations, actually in the morning. That really taught me a lot about what to do with sort of reframing those thoughts into something innocuous. And I like to sort of think of a lot of those thoughts as sort of mind clutter. It’s like how do I clear out the clutter, but not with a heavy, powered tool, but just with a little swipe of a little feather duster or something like that. So I mean, one of my favorite images was thinking of some of those thoughts as some rambunctious little puppy that is bouncing around in my mind. That’s so cute and makes me smile. Or I had one where I could imagine some of those thoughts in a parade on some of those banners and they’re just marching along and then disappear. Someplace to put them in, so that they weren’t really very arousing and things like that. And just to sort of reframe them in ways so that it almost got to be a habit, that I could reframe most arousing thought into something really more useful and more exploratory about what was going on with me. And then just sort of put them aside. But that took some practice. That took quite a bit of practice. So anyone who’s listening out there, that’s not something that you’re going to master overnight. It takes some practice, but well worth it. Well worth it to sort of reframe those thoughts into something that is just very normal. Martin Reed: I think one way of moving away from that struggle or building skill in moving away from that struggle… And skills require practice. If someone handed me a guitar right now, I’d sound atrocious. It would take me years and years and years to build skill in playing a guitar, for example. And this isn’t really that different. It’s a skill, it’s a new skillset. If we recognize that we might benefit from a different approach to all this difficult stuff, then it probably make sense that it’s going to require practice, it’s going to require us developing a new skill. And that does take time. Listening to you describe your approach, it sounds like you practiced going away from trying to directly fight or avoid the thoughts that were turning up and more towards observing them. And you thought to yourself, “Well, how can I observe these so they feel maybe less threatening or I’m less likely to get thrown around by these thoughts?” And you’ve used that example of, “Well, I kind of imagined these thoughts were like a rambunctious puppy.” So the thoughts were there, but they took this form that’s a little bit less threatening, and then you just kind of observed them. Anne-Claire France: Oh, I would even greet them. I would say, oh, yeah. It’s like, oh, well, hello thoughts. And you’re there and not fight it. It’s just like, well, hello there. And you are what you are and welcome. And sort of really put a positive spin on them. So that there wasn’t a reason for them to stick around. Martin Reed: So because you weren’t going to war with them, then maybe the brain didn’t feel like it had to keep on pushing this on you harder and harder and harder. Anne-Claire France: That’s right, that’s right. Well, it’s, okay, you’ve done your job. Now it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to go away.” So that was part of this practice and really retooling in my mind about number one, even welcoming disturbing or arousing kind of thought, and then just allowing them to be and reframing them until they just sort of faded away. And so that’s the part that does take a little bit of practice. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. And I think one area where we can get tripped up is when our goal is, “Okay, I’ll do this. And my goal is to get rid of them.” Because then we are just still tangled up in that struggle of trying to fight or avoid them. So we really… We’re almost like we’re setting ourselves up for struggle. So we’re not really going to get where we want to be if our goal is still to get rid of these thoughts and feelings. It really is just about practicing responding to them without that struggle. And sometimes there’s a bonus, they might just disappear. But really what we’re doing is moving away from the battle because when we’re engaged in a battle with our minds, as far as our brain is concerned, we’re at war. We might as well just have that huge suit of armor on, riding the war horse with a big sword in our hand. The thoughts aren’t going to disappear when we’re at war. And second of all, how likely is sleep going to happen if we’re engaged in this huge medieval battle with our minds in the middle of the night? Anne-Claire France: Yeah, yeah, very much. As a matter of fact, It got to the point where getting rid of those thoughts didn’t occur to me anymore. It was really more, oh, there they are. Again. Well, hello. And then I guess they would just get bored and go off. Martin Reed: You mentioned that you practiced a lot of this in the mornings. Did you ever practice it in the middle of the night or when you first got into bed and you were struggling to fall asleep? Did you ever get any practice in with that kind of approach at that time? Anne-Claire France: I did, but at the beginning I thought, well, I’ll do this when I’m trying to fall asleep. But see, I just even said that I was trying to fall asleep, which implies effort. And so the more I would do towards a goal of trying to fall asleep, it was almost paradox. So I found that if I did my guided meditation in the morning and then practiced a lot of that during the day, when I was up and around, and we all have lots of opportunities during the day to chill out a little bit and maybe reframe some things that are happening, that it got to be a habit. So that when I was in bed I didn’t even have to try to do things. So it was sort of a part of the way I was thinking. But I did try that at first, but again, as I mentioned, it had that paradoxical effect of putting effort into trying to sleep. Which is, I think you’ve mentioned, that’s the one thing that usually putting effort into something is a good thing, but when it’s for sleep, not a good thing. Martin Reed: It’s great that you were able to even notice that because I think so much of the struggle can come from, we just don’t even notice when it’s happening. When we’re actually tangled up in that struggle. When our goal or our intent is maybe that roadblock that’s stopping us from reaching that goal. Because just like you said, the more we try to make sleep happen, the more difficult it can become. It’s kind of like the more we try to breathe, the more confusing it all becomes, right? It’s just, breathing is this natural process. And if we kind of decide, “Okay, today I want to take a certain number of breaths. I want to be able to inhale a certain volume of air in my lungs with every breath and average a certain intake of gas every day averaged over a week.” Breathing’s going to get really confusing and stressful. And sleep is really the same. It’s kind of that the more attention we give it, the more we try to intervene, the more difficult it can all become. And I think if we could just notice that that’s what we’re tangled up in, then there’s that huge opportunity. That word you used right at the start of this conversation, you notice that there’s that opportunity to change. And the process of change isn’t easy. It does require ongoing practice, but there’s that opportunity there to respond, to approach this in a different way. And just knowing that opportunity exists can sometimes be a little bit comforting and reassuring in and of itself. And listening to these kind of discussions as well from people that have been tangled up in that process and unraveled from it can be really reassuring too. Anne-Claire France: And really the epiphany I had was there’s really two parts to the cognitive behavioral therapy. There’s what do you need to do to get your body physiologically attuned for sleep with sleep drive and things of that nature, and the various exercises if you will that you have folks do. But then there’s the arousal part. And the mind arousal part. And it was like no matter what I did with all the physiological exercises I did to get my body in tune, arousal would win over every time. So I thought I have to focus on that to try to really give my body and mind every opportunity to do what should come naturally. And just do everything I can to just promote sleep without putting a lot of effort into it by sort of retooling a number of what’s going on cognitively, psychologically as well as physiologically. Martin Reed: I like to think of it as this kind of two-pronged approach. So we have the behavioral side of things in terms of our habits around sleep or our behaviors around sleep. And then we have all the stuff that goes on inside us. The thoughts and the feelings and how we respond to those. And I think a lot of people do really well just changing that one prong, the behavioral approach. So they might notice that, “I’m going to bed at eight o’clock. I’m really struggling. Before I had any issues with sleep, I used to go to bed at 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night. Maybe that’s a change. I can kind of go back to my old way of doing things. Maybe going to bed really early isn’t helping me, or maybe staying in bed really late in the morning isn’t helping me. Maybe trying to nap during the day isn’t helping me.” And that approach for a lot of people is all that’s needed, just that behavioral change. Change in their behavioral approach, new habits. But then for some people, that’s a great way to set the stage for sleep, but there’s still that battle going on in the mind. So if we’re not falling asleep in a certain amount of time, the brain’s like, “It’s going to be another one of those nights. You’re not going to be able to sleep, you’re not going to be able to do anything tomorrow. You’re just going to be sitting on that couch. No one’s going to want to talk to you because you’re going to be so miserable.” All that stuff starts coming up and then we start trying to fight it, distracting ourselves, pushing it away, getting mad at ourselves, being mean to ourselves, “Why am I thinking these thoughts?” And I think that’s where exploring a new way of responding to all that difficult stuff that’s going on in our minds, that second prong approach is really, is kind of like the cherry on top of the cake. If we can also go down that route as well, which I think to be honest is more difficult. Often more difficult. If we can get down that road too, then really we’re setting ourselves up for success. And by success I mean living the kind of life we want to live independently of sleep and regardless of the difficult thoughts and feelings our brain is generating while it’s doing its job of looking out for us. Anne-Claire France: For me, I needed to do the whole hog, if you will. I had to do the physiology as well as the sort of the mind body connection. And I really had to have the willingness to have full commitment. I mean, I thought, okay, I’m just going to do this and make the time for it and do the things that were even uncomfortable. Such as the sleep restriction, was very, very helpful for me. And very interesting to recognize how that worked. And then at the same time, working on what’s going on from the arousal standpoint. And naturally sort of all that mind clutter that I mentioned that we have a lot of times. Martin Reed: You touched upon sleep restriction a couple of times now. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that approach panned out for you? Just for someone that’s listening maybe has never heard of sleep restriction before, maybe you could just explain what it was or your understanding of it in your own words and how you implemented it and what that process of implementation was like for you. Anne-Claire France: Yeah, I did some reading up on it of course, and to be honest, I think it should be called bed restriction instead of sleep restriction. Because it has not as great a connotation as what’s going on. But as a scientist, I’m used to collecting data. And so I was all for logging really what my sleep was for a couple of weeks to see how much sleep I was actually getting and how much time, from the time in bed, all those kinds of things. So for everyone out there, you keep track of how much time you’re in bed and how much time you’re awake versus asleep and various other data points as well. And then a sleep window, if you will, is constructed for you so that you don’t go to bed until a certain time. And then you only stay in bed a certain amount of time. And so really what you’re doing, the whole point is to stimulate sleep drive. And so I will say that the one thing that was one of the biggest helps to me was because I had been on a long-term sleep medication, I had lost the ability and did not realize this, but I had lost the ability to recognize true sleepiness because I would just fall asleep by virtue of that medication that I was taking. And so I would misread tiredness for sleepiness. And you can be tired but be wide awake. As opposed to having that sleepiness. And so what sleep restriction, bed restriction did for me was allow me to discover what truly feeling sleepy meant. And so it was a much more natural thing to go to bed. I’m sleepy, therefore I’m going to sleep. So that was very, very helpful for me. And I know it probably sounds funny for a lot of folks, but being able to distinguish between tiredness and true sleepiness was pivotal for me. And a big, big help for me early on in the sleep restriction exercises that we were doing. And so then I was able to extend the number of hours and so forth. Yeah. Martin Reed: It’s something I hear really quite common that, “I kind of lost this sensation of sleepiness.” Or, “I might feel sleepy earlier in the night, but then it’s time for bed and then all that sleepiness just seems to disappear.” And I think a lot of people with chronic insomnia do mistake fatigue or tiredness for sleepiness. I think a lot of people without insomnia probably do too because we often use the words interchangeably, but there is a difference. Now you’re able to reflect on that yourself. If I’m going to put you on the spot and ask you to describe the difference for you, because everyone is different, but what was that difference like? What’s the difference between feeling tired and fatigued, which might not indicate that you’re ready for sleep compared to sleepiness, which might indicate that your body’s ready to start generating sleep? Anne-Claire France: Well, tired is really more of a fatigue, and you might want to go, “Well, I just feel like not doing much.” And just maybe sitting around and watching some TV or just hanging out. Whereas sleepiness, you get that true where your eyes start drooping and you can just feel the sensation in your brain of true wanting to fall asleep. Whereas in tiredness, you don’t have that at all. But where your eyes again, start drooping and you can almost start nodding off. And so when you’re tired, you don’t necessarily do. But that sort of nodding off sensation I was like, oh, I couldn’t remember the last time that I had that happen to me and it was just delightful. It’s like, oh, yes, now I’m recalling what this is and this means that truly my sleep drive is kicking in and this is an opportunity for me to actually get some sleep. Martin Reed: I think that’s a great way of describing it. And for people that aren’t sure what we mean by sleep drive, it’s almost like hunger, but for sleep. Like biological hunger for sleep. So we wake up in the morning, most of us are pretty hungry because we haven’t eaten all night. So we’ll eat some breakfast, then we’re not hungry anymore until around lunchtime and then maybe not until dinnertime. And what can happen when we have insomnia and we really want to chase after sleep and make sleep happen is we might start going to bed before we’re sleepy, which is a bit like sitting at the dinner table at three o’clock in the afternoon waiting to get hungry for dinner at night. The chances are we’re just going to be sitting there doing nothing for a long time until biologically the body’s like, “Okay, I’m ready to eat.” Or, “I’m ready to sleep now.” And so with a sleep window, all we’re looking to do is, all right, if I’m averaging X amount of sleep over the course of a week or two, then I’m going to allot roughly that much time to be in bed. So we’re not taking sleep away from ourselves. That’s why sleep restriction is probably really unhelpful terminology. Because it implies that we are restricting sleep, but what we’re doing really is just restricting the amount of time available for wakefulness. Because if we know from our own experience that we’re averaging three, four, five hours of sleep, then by spending 8, 9, 10 hours in bed, we’re setting ourselves up for long periods of wakefulness and we’re more likely to be going to bed before the body is actually ready for bed, before it’s ready for sleep to happen. And really that’s all there is to it. It’s not one of these things that can make sleep happen. It’s not one of these things that guarantees we’re not going to spend time awake at night, but it just helps us move away from chasing after sleep, trying to make it happen in a way that makes it more difficult for sleep to happen. Anne-Claire France: Yeah, I mean I think your analogy of it being like hunger is great. There was a saying I read somewhere where, sleep to live, not live to sleep. There are a lot of people, “Well, I just like to sleep.” It’s like, well, if your body is not ready for it… And it also, the other really epiphany that I had was that you need to do what your body needs as opposed to what you want. And it’d be nice if you could just, well, I’m going to sleep whenever I want or do whatever things when I want. But if your body’s just… That’s not what it needs, then you need to respect that and perhaps alter your thinking on your approaches to certain things. Whether it’s eating or sleeping or any of those other things that we do for sustenance and health. Martin Reed: We talked about that sleep restriction as one part of the behavioral changes that you made, just giving yourself an earliest possible bedtime and getting out of bed a reasonably consistent time every morning as well. Were there any other behavioral changes you made that looking back upon reflection you found were useful too? Anne-Claire France: Well, the one thing that you just mentioned that I didn’t allude too much on, but it turned out to be critical, was the consistent time of getting out of bed. That no matter what time I went to sleep, I always got out bed at the same time. So even if I was up till two o’clock in the morning and my get out of bedtime was five, I would get up at five. And whether it was the weekend, vacation, whatever, it was just really important to have that consistent, get out of bed time. And not try to catch up on sleep. A lot of people think that that’s a good idea, but it definitely… Maybe it was at one time, but certainly was not helpful. Martin Reed: That catching up on sleep, that idea of, “I need to catch up on sleep.” Why sometimes it’s not helpful, we can kind of go back to that hunger analogy again, right? Because it would be like, “I really want to eat. I really want eating to happen. I really don’t like feeling hungry. I want to feel full.” So four o’clock in the afternoon we have this huge three course meal, and then we’re kind like, “Yes, I’ve caught up.” And then at eight o’clock or nine o’clock at night when everyone’s kind of already eating dinner, you’re still not eating dinner yet, you’re kind of sitting there, “Oh, I want to eat now, but I’m full.” And it’s kind like that when we’re catching up on sleep. It can feel great at the time, “Yeah, I’m catching up on sleep.” Or, “I’ve just fallen asleep at four o’clock and my alarm’s gone off at five, I’m just going to sleep in until eight or nine o’clock.” Well, yeah, it can feel great at the time, but then we’re kind of setting ourselves up for difficulties later on. Anne-Claire France: Oh, absolutely. I actually look back on just my life in general in that I would tend to work all week and then I’d sleep in on Sundays. Till nine in the morning. And then looking back, I always wondered why I couldn’t fall asleep on Sunday night. Well, because my body had as much sleep as it needed. And is like, well… Then I’d have to get back on track before I ever had… This was before I ever had, quote, “insomnia”. I would not sleep well on Sunday nights because I would sleep in on Sunday mornings. So another two and two together. Martin Reed: And sometimes it’s worth it, right? It is just like everything that helps us live a rich and meaningful life tends to come with some downsides and some difficult stuff, and sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes we’ll be like, “Yeah, I want to have a lie in on Saturday or Sunday. That helps me live the life I want to live. It might lead to some sleep disruption on the next night, but I’m okay with that.” And that’s fine. It’s just being aware of the fact that our choices that we make, they’re going to have consequences. And it’s down to us as individuals, we are the expert on ourselves to know if that’s a trade off we’re okay with. And if we are, then fine. There’s no need to change anything. Anne-Claire France: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But I did make that connection. I laughed about it actually. Went, well… Oh, well, that was fine. Martin Reed: When we are dealing with chronic insomnia, there can be so many insights to be gained from reflecting back on what our approach to sleep was before it all seemed so difficult. I think there’s so many valuable snippets of information from our own experience that we can use to our advantage there. Because when we are really caught up in the struggle, the brain’s looking out for us and it’s just laser focused on fixing the problem. And it’s that trying to fix the problem, which is often what gets us caught up in that quicksand, caught up in the struggle. And the more we try, the more we keep sinking. If we are able to reflect back, “Well, how did I approach this before?” Whether that was one year, 10 years, 50 years ago, we might be able to get some little insights there that can help us as we move forward. You talked about you were implementing the sleep restriction or the sleep window. So what was that actually like? Because it’s one thing to talk about, “All right, I’m not going to go to bed before a certain time. I’m going to get out of bed no matter what at say, five o’clock or six o’clock in the morning.” Whatever your lifestyle is, the time that works for you. Let’s just kind of go back to night one. And you kind of set this up for yourself. What did that look like in practice? Was it something that you found really easy to do? Did you find that you were immediately just falling asleep as soon as your head hit the pillow and just sleeping right through the night? What was that actual experience of implementation like? Anne-Claire France: Oh, no. It was challenging. It was challenging. And that was one of the first things where I said, I need to be willing to commit myself to do this because I knew that it was probably going to take some time for something to happen. So no, that first night I was probably awake the whole night. And so I just told my husband, here’s going to be what’s going on. And so it was helpful that he was very supportive of all this. But it was probably, I’d say about a week went by of it being pretty tough. But I hung in. And then I would make sure that of course, that I didn’t take any naps. Even though I got, quote, “sleepy” during the day. I was not going to take any naps because I didn’t want to use up if you will, some of my sleep drive. I wanted it to build up as much as possible. And I remember, believe it or not, I remember being so excited when I got a full hour of sleep. And I mean, that was a big improvement. And then it was an hour and a half and then two hours and then three hours, and I would have awakenings, but I would fall back asleep. So I did that for quite some time and realized that the whole idea of needing, of this… There’s a lot of advisement out there that you need to have seven to nine hours of sleep, well, that’s a recommendation, but however for me, I seem to do just fine at six. And so when I was at six, I was very, very happy to get six hours. And again, I would wake up during the night. That was fine. And then go back to sleep. But over time, my sleep time has increased. But I was at six hours for a long time and felt great with that. I mean, my body felt great. I was clearheaded, the whole nine yards. But as I’ve managed the arousal part that we talked about earlier, I’ve extended my sleep hours by at least… Oftentimes it’s seven to eight now. Again with awakenings. Just awakenings. Yeah. Martin Reed: And have you found that, going back to that change of approach to the arousal, the thoughts, the feelings, all that stuff that often comes with wakefulness, as you’ve become more skilled in responding to that in a different way when it shows up, do you find that when wakefulness shows up, when you’re just awake during the night, you have kind of a different relationship with that wakefulness now? Anne-Claire France: Yes, yes, very much. First off, what was important was realizing that having awakenings was very, very normal. And that just with the cycle of sleep, you’re probably going to wake up most likely every 90 minutes or so, whether you know it or not. So just knowing that that was a physiological normal thing to do was very helpful. And then the fact that I had been sleeping and then waking, before I would’ve gotten a little panicky about, oh, no, I’m now awake and I’m not going to be able to go to sleep, and oh, my gosh. And things of that nature. Whereas it evolved into, oh, this is just a normal thing for me to wake up and then just enjoy the wakefulness. I actually said, oh, I can think about some nice things while I’m here. Or maybe do another little mind exercise for myself just for enjoyment or something like that. And as I got more and more skilled at that then my awakenings were more on the lines of I’d wake up, but I’d feel sleepy still as opposed to being really wake. But I know I was still sleepy and then I would fall back to sleep pretty quickly. Martin Reed: Maybe it comes down to that willingness, like you’ve mentioned a few times. When we are more willing to experience the wakefulness or when we are more willing to experience the thoughts and feelings that come with being a human being, especially the difficult ones, we become less responsive to those things when they show up. So like you just mentioned, maybe in the past you would wake during the night and kind of the brain would start flashing that red light and the sirens would be going off, here’s the wakefulness, everything’s going to be a disaster now. And then you’re all tense. Compared to when we are more willing to experience the wakefulness it’s kind of, we wake up, “Oh, there’s that wakefulness.” There’s no more alarm bells. There’s no sirens going off. But I think it’s one thing to say, “Oh, I need to be willing to experience this.” It’s quite another to actually be willing because it is unpleasant, especially when we’re really caught up in the struggle. If someone’s listening to this and just thinking to themselves, “Willing to experience insomnia, no. I don’t want to be willing to experience insomnia because it’s awful. How am I going to be willing to experience something that is this unpleasant?” I’m putting you on the spot a bit here, but what would you say to someone who’s feeling that way? Because I think most people with chronic insomnia are like, “No, I’m completely unwilling to experience this because it’s very unpleasant.” How do we get from there to this place of more willingness? Anne-Claire France: I think part of it is to accept that everyone, whether you’re quote, an “insomniac” or not, everyone’s going to have wakefulness. It’s not just unique to folks who think who have insomnia per se. And everyone, even good sleepers, if you will, are going to have difficult nights. I mean, that’s just the way it is. So there’s a lot of company out there, and being awake is really just a natural part of the 24 hour cycle in our lives. And I think that some people think that acceptance or willingness to do something is similar to resignation. And I think resignation is when you feel defeated and there’s nothing you can do about this. Whereas acceptance and willingness is, “I can do something different. Perhaps I can learn some things with a coach or something like that to help me get the potential to promote my sleep.” So the willingness to be awake and play around with that in a good way, in a positive way, and learn from that is all part of that whole exercise to get to where you want to be. And it’s really the positive end as opposed to, “There’s something wrong with me. There’s nothing I can do about this.” But if you can transition that to being willing and accepting, then that’s a, “No, I can do something about this and reach my potential.” Martin Reed: What was the process like in terms of progress? Everyone always wants… As human beings, we always want to kind of measure our progress against other people. And I always try and steer people away from that because especially with sleep, it’s something we can’t directly control. So we’re kind of trying to make something happen that we can’t control because someone else was able to make something happen that they couldn’t control on a certain time period, and we’re trying to match that. But I think what can be helpful is recognizing that progress is very rarely linear. It usually comes with ups and downs. And progress is really different from person to person. I think what’s more useful is just focusing on what we can control, which is the practice. Practice rather than progress. Because if we are practicing a new, more workable approach to all this difficult stuff, then the progress will take care of itself. And we can’t control the progress. We can only control the practice. So when you were implementing all these changes that we’ve been talking about, what was that like for you in terms of progress? Were you finding that each night was just better than the last and that you were just kind of on this straight line uphill where everything was always getting better, or were there some bumps in the roads and some ups and downs and difficulties too? Anne-Claire France: Oh, yeah. It was anything but linear. And I’ll say that when I graduated from your course, it wasn’t like everything was hunky dory and we were all done. I thought, I now have the tools, the skills, the information I need along with everything else I’ve been doing to do what I need to do to try to make improvements. And so things would go well, then I’d have a setback for a few days or whatever. The big difference for me, that was so important was that when I had a setback, I didn’t panic. It was really more of a, oh, I know what’s happening. Here’s what I need to do. And so the two years since I graduated from your class to now were much better than before. But there was sort of that up and down, but my whole attitude about it was completely different. That, well, I know what to do. I know exactly what’s happening. I can do this or that or pay more attention to this or that. And that didn’t mean I had to disrupt my life or anything like that. It was really more of a, oh, yeah, I forgot and I got a little lazy on some things. For example, I might’ve slept in or I took a nap or whatever. I could attribute things. And so it was really more of a, I know what to do now when I do have those setbacks. And it’s just been within the last few months or so where I haven’t had any setbacks whatsoever, without something that I could attribute it to. Like there was a very loud noise or something that was going on wherever I was sleeping. But it’s not a linear process. I think everyone who does something like this it’s, their progress, if you will, is going to be unique to them. And to try not to compare yourself to anybody else. As long as you have the tools and you can just go back and refer to them, reference them. I think one of the great things that you do for folks is you allow everyone to keep all the material that you had so you can go back and listen. And then of course you have podcasts and various other things for people to listen to. So just refresh your memory and your skills and put them into practice and it’ll work out. Martin Reed: How long do you think it took for you to get to a point where sleep wasn’t something you were just kind of endlessly struggling with? It wasn’t kind of on your mind, crowding out all the other things that you wanted to think about or pay attention to, and you just felt better able to live your life independently of what happened at night when just your general relationship changed and you felt, “Yeah, I don’t feel like this is a struggle anymore. I might still have some difficult nights, but it’s not something that’s kind of consuming my attention, my life.” Anne-Claire France: I would say at least six months. It was probably at least six months. And my attitude about it really… And again, it wasn’t a sudden attitude change. It was really an evolution in my attitude change, in that, oh, this is just… And my perception of the insomnia part of me was, oh, that’s just that. And I don’t have to worry about it. It’ll come and go. And I would even… People if I was on vacation or visiting with people and they’d say, “How’d you sleep?” And I said, well, for me, I don’t sleep like everybody else, but that’s just me. And it’s just kind of normal. And I didn’t attribute me being an insomniac anymore. It was really more of a, my sleep patterns are evolving over time. And what’s normal for me is not going to be normal for somebody else. And so my normality, if you will, my normal state has evolved as well as I think my body has now become accustomed to getting what it needs as opposed to me saying, here’s what I want. And me paying more attention to that. And sometimes I’m not sleepy. So if I’m not sleepy, I’m not going to try to go to sleep. But if I’m sleepy well… Like in the middle of the day, I’m going to do my best maybe to have a cat nap for 10 minutes as opposed to sleeping for an hour. Being respectful of the sleep drive that I’d like to kick in later on. But it took me a while to get to that point. Martin Reed: As human beings, we always want to make progress really quickly. We always want to develop new skills immediately, but they require work and effort and ups and downs. It’s just a normal part of the journey. So I think it’s helpful to hear from other people what that process was like for them. Because it’s really easy to hold ourselves to these impossibly high standards. And it’s so ironic that we can hold ourselves to these high standards, but we can’t even directly control reaching those standards when it comes to sleep. Because there’s no magic sleep switch that we can find hidden away in our brain that we can just activate upon command. So it’s really helpful to just hear the more realistic experience from people like you coming on, saying, “Yes, there are ups and downs. It’s not easy, is difficult. It requires commitment, it requires willingness. And it requires time. It’s not a quick fix. It might take months, it might take even longer. It’s ongoing practice.” And it’s that ongoing practice which really is the key because it’s so easy to get disheartened and the brain is telling you, “This isn’t going to work. Give up. Go back to all the old stuff that you know from experience doesn’t work, but maybe try that stuff even harder.” So it’s really easy to get pushed off track. And so it is a case of just keeping on going. Persevering. Anne-Claire France: Yeah, it really is like a journey. It’s like a journey. And included in that journey is you have to say goodbye to some old habits. And we know about habit formation. That’s very challenging to change, something that’s a habit. Because we just do that without even thinking. And you do your habits without even giving it much thought, but realizing that something that could be impacting your sleep is a habit. And you’re like, “Oh, my, that’s something I have to change.” And that can be tough at first, but when you realize the benefit of that, then all the other habits that you may have to change, you’re like, “Okay, I understand why I may have to make those changes.” But yeah, it’s a journey I think. And I am more attuned to a potential habit that might creep in. I’m like, oh, I know where this is going to go. So maybe not. Martin Reed: So Anne-Claire, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and just share your experience. I do have one last question for you, which would be great if you could answer, because I think you’d feel a bit left out if I didn’t ask you because I tend to ask this question or something similar to it to every guest. So here we go. It’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening, they feel as though they’ve just tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they’ll just never be able to move away from that struggle with sleep, with insomnia. What would you say to them? Anne-Claire France: I think I’d say, be willing to step back and learn about what sleep really is all about. That it is a natural state. And most likely the reason why you’re having struggles is because you are doing things that are disrupting your natural state. And if you can learn about what all those things are as well as what promotes the natural state, then everyone has potential. And the best way to do that is not to try to figure it out all yourself, but perhaps reach out to someone like yourself to say, “Here are the tried and true types of things that you can do, and I’m willing to help you along. And ensure that you can reach your potential.” But be willing to be patient. You have to be patient and make the commitment to make those sometimes large, but often small changes that can add up in the end. Martin Reed: That’s great. Well, I think that’s an excellent note to end on. So thanks again for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast Anne-Claire. Anne-Claire France: You’re welcome. It was my pleasure. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

The stress of COVID and the breakup of Jessy’s community created a period of sleep disruption that she couldn’t shake off, no matter how hard she tried. At first, she found it really hard to fall asleep and soon after that she started to wake during the night and found it hard to fall back to sleep, too. Difficult nights became more frequent — at first they would show up just once a week, then twice a week, then a few times a week. As sleep got more difficult, Jessy started to get really scared and things spiraled from there because no matter what she did in an attempt to get her sleep back on track, she continued to struggle. Jessy took medication that didn’t seem to be helping, but she worried that if she didn’t continue to take it, things would get worse. She felt desperate, hopeless, and alone. She felt as though she was losing control over her life. One day, Jessy found the Insomnia Coach podcast and started to feel hope as she listened to the stories of others who had experienced what she was going through. And, from there, she decided to work with me. One of Jessy’s transformational moments came when she decided to continue working, still go out with friends, and still do things that mattered to her even after difficult nights and even when she felt really tired. By doing this, she started to take back control of her life, even when insomnia was still present, and she realized this also gave her the opportunity to focus on things other than sleep. Jessy started to realize that the more she tried to fight or avoid all the difficult stuff that came with insomnia, the more difficult things became. So, she started to acknowledge whatever she was thinking or feeling and practiced being kinder to herself when things were difficult. As she allowed her thoughts and feelings to flow with less resistance, Jessy realized that her thoughts often contained important information and reminders of what was important to her. She also realized that her mind could often be an unreliable narrator. That what it said wasn’t always true or accurate. These insights helped Jessy separate herself from her thoughts and feel less influenced and controlled by them. Today, Jessy considers her sleep to be quite normal. She is no longer tangled up in a struggle, trying to control her sleep. She is living the life she wants to live. Although she was certainly not grateful for her insomnia while she was struggling with it, she now sees the experience as giving her the opportunity to recognize her own resilience and the confidence to do hard things. She now believe that the experience of insomnia helped to catapult her into the next phase of her life. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay, Jessy, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Jessy Baer: Yeah, no problem. It’s exciting to be here. I’ve been looking forward to it. Martin Reed: Let’s just dive right in and get started, as always, right at the beginning. When did your sleep problems first begin, and what do you think caused those initial issues with sleep? Jessy Baer: Yeah, that’s a great question. My sleep problems began sort of right, maybe a few months, after quarantine began in the US, in California. I was living at the time in San Francisco, in a big co-op with around 20 people. Martin Reed: Wow. Jessy Baer: Maybe at that time it was … I absolutely loved it, and it was all my best friends, and I was so deeply attached to that community. And when COVID happened, it presented a lot of challenges for community living. And there was just a lot of conflict, a lot of people. It had been a very stable place, and I had lived there five years, best friends there. Again, very, very attached to this space, couldn’t imagine life without it. And during COVID, people moved out. Two factions started happening in the house, and there was just incredible, incredible conflict. And it was really unclear. It wasn’t this safe home anymore. It was this place of conflict and people leaving. And I think it was just deeply, deeply, deeply troubling to me. And I think it started off a stress reaction that actually started. I got, I never had had acid reflux before, but I came down with that, and then that happened. And then a few months later, the insomnia started to happen, and it just got worse and worse. Yeah, but it was very much triggered by, I think, feeling very deeply this deep source of home, and attachment had been completely overturned and feeling really sort of unsafe and concerned about the future of this community and these relationships. Martin Reed: So what was sleep like for you at that time? Was it kind of you were just starting to find it hard to fall asleep at the start of the night? Or was it waking during the night and finding it hard to fall back to sleep? Or maybe it was a combination of all of those things. Jessy Baer: Yeah, so well, one thing I think is kind of interesting, and I think it kind of goes to some of this stuff around how sleep hygiene is really not that useful. Because I had come down with this acid reflux, and my doctor had told … And I was someone who drank caffeine in the morning and then had maybe a glass of wine at night. And I had stopped both of those because of the reflux. I was told that would help. So I was technically in the state where I was not drinking caffeine or alcohol. That’s actually when the insomnia happened. So it just further proved to me that it’s really not related to those things at all. But yeah, no, I remember it happened kind of slowly. It would just be a few nights where I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. And then it would sort of become … It kind of progressed, I think as my stress around the community falling apart progressed. And then it turned into not being able to fall asleep or waking up in the middle of the night. And it would just happen at either … It wasn’t consistently not being able to fall asleep or waking up in the middle of the night. It was just both. It was both of those. And it was more, just it was increasing, I think. So the off nights maybe started out once a week. They started going twice a week, started going a few times a week. I started, then I started developing the fear of not being able to sleep and it becoming something, a fear around sleep, not just my stress around the community. And started Googling insomnia and finding all these diagnoses of, if you’re having off nights twice a week, you have insomnia. And then I started really freaking out and thinking I have a condition. And it just kind of spiraled, honestly. And yeah, it really spiraled from there. Martin Reed: So you kind of touched upon it there. What most of us do when we face a problem in life is we kind of turn to Google to find the answers. What kind of things had you tried before you found Insomnia Coach, before you began this journey, where now you’re able to look back and know what was helpful and what wasn’t quite so helpful? What kind of things had you tried back then on reflection? It’s understandable, why we tried them, but perhaps they weren’t that helpful in the end. Jessy Baer: I tried so many things. I tried a valerian root. I tried CBD. I tried magnesium. I tried, man, I don’t smoke marijuana. It doesn’t really agree with me. I get kind of anxious on it, but I’ve decided maybe marijuana will do it. I tried that, got really anxious, was up for many hours, because I was so anxious. It was very much not the right thing. But I was like, I’ll try anything again. Again, as I mentioned, I wasn’t even drinking caffeine or alcohol during that time. That was not even part of my diet. What else? I tried sleeping in different rooms. I tried asking my friend, because I started to have a negative association with my room in my house. And I think also because I was doing everything in that room during quarantine, I was working in that room. I was sleeping in that room. I was hanging out in that room. It was this tiny room with everything. So I’ve tried. I had got some of my housemates who were gone. I tried to go to their room with an off night. I tried more abstract psychotherapy work. I was like clearly, maybe there’s something deeper to solve here. So I think I tried psychotherapy and just doing that. That didn’t work. I also, man, I tried writing all my worries out on a piece of paper before bed, because I know that’s a technique where you can get your worries out that way. That did not help. That technique really did not work for me. It just made me kind of think about my worries more. It didn’t feel like a release. And then I guess the biggest thing I tried, I had kind of a freak-out call with my primary care doctor, who’s wonderful. She’s a really wonderful doctor. I had a real breakdown call with her, and she prescribed me Trazodone. Yeah, Trazodone, which is more an anti-anxiety medication. But I remember, I think she was just … I think I was calmer after that call, because she seemed confident that it might work. And so I remember I took the first Trazodone pill and slept well that night. And so I was like okay, maybe this is the last straw. It’s my primary care doctor. This is the last thing I’m trying, and if this doesn’t work, nothing will work. And I remember I slept well that night, I think, because I was just calm, because we had had a very emotional session. And I had just vented about everything and all the grief I was feeling. And she seemed confident. But then the second night is … It didn’t work. And I had a terrible night of sleep, and then I really started to lose hope, because if the thing my doctor hadn’t prescribed didn’t work, then I didn’t know who was going to have confidence. If my doctor couldn’t be confident in this, then I didn’t know who could. So yeah, that was the trigger to that actually led. And actually one thing in the background, I remember I had tried reaching out to Stanford to just sleep therapists. I had Googled. I was like, is there some kind of therapy that specializes in sleep? I just was thinking, is there some specialist, sleep specialist? And I remember Googling Stanford and calling them, because I lived in near Stanford at the time, and trying to get an appointment with them. And they couldn’t give me an appointment for six months or something. Martin Reed: Wow. Jessy Baer: Because they were so backed up, because there were so many people having insomnia issues at this moment in quarantine. I think a lot of people were having a similar situation to me and that life stressors had gotten out of control, and then this had triggered insomnia. So I remember just thinking there’s no hope there. And as I can just share, so this, all this moment of the Trazodone not working, I was just so desperate, I remember, and feeling just hopeless and so alone, so alone. I felt like no … just so alone. It was such a … I felt like there was this huge filter on me in the world and me and my future. But I remember, I was walking the dog, and I was just looking at my phone, desperate to not feel so alone in this. And I have a Stitcher podcast, and I just searched insomnia. And I just did that, and your program showed up, which is so serendipitous. And I was like Insomnia Coach, interesting. And then I remember listening. I still remember the first interview of yours with this woman, this wonderful woman I listened to on my walk. And that was seriously a transformational moment, because I had never heard an insomnia success story. Everyone had just told me that, if you have insomnia, you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life. It’s just kind of this hopeless thing. And I remember that was the first thing that gave me hope. And then I found your program. But it was really after desperation and trying so many things. And even the doctor-prescribed medicine wasn’t even working. Yeah, it was a long road to find your podcast. Martin Reed: You’re not the first person to say how powerful it was just to find other people out there sharing their story and not only sharing their story as in all the ways they’re struggling, so we know that we’re not alone. But when people are talking about their kind of transformation, it is possible to change our relationship with sleep. It doesn’t have to be this struggle, this battle that we have to endure all night, every night and struggle with all day, every single day. There is a way through it all. And that in itself can be so comforting. It’s so easy to just believe that we’re broken when we’re caught up in this huge struggle with it. But the truth is, none of us are ever broken. We get stuck from time to time, and we just need a little bit of help getting unstuck. And that’s why I’m so grateful for people like yourself who are willing to come onto the podcast and just share their story. Because every story is maybe a little bit different, but the big theme is generally the same. There’s like this trigger for the sleep disruption. There’s all the things that we try to do to fix it, which tend not to be that helpful. Then that leads to more worry, makes us think with there’s something uniquely wrong. But when we hear that story in others and recognize that we’re not unique, we’re not alone, there is a way forward. It’s just so powerful and so comforting and reassuring and motivating. So I’m really grateful for guests just like yourself coming on and sharing this story. Jessy Baer: Yeah, no, your podcast was actually a huge part of my recovery. Because I did your program, and of course off nights happen. And what I would always do when I was in that point where I had an off night, and I was getting a little stressed or worried or my trust was getting a little shaken, I would just go on a long walk. I remember I had these walks, these hikes and walks throughout Los Altos, where I was, that I would go on. And I would just listen to a new one of your stories. And that was the medicine that helped me in these moments of doubt and fear. I just would listen to one of your stories. I feel like I listened to so many of them. It is just one of those things where I feel like it takes … You can hear the same thing over, and it helped to hear it over and over again and from different people. It didn’t get old. It was just every single time, it was incredibly useful. Every new voice was incredibly useful, and it really just helped me normalize. It gave me a lot of hope and also just normalized for me the twists and turns and ups and downs of the journey, because it was a nonlinear journey. And to hear their different stories and all their unique twists and turns and moments of doubt, it was so, so helpful. And I think there was something about moving. I was just walking, going on these long nature walks, listening to their voices. And it just really helped me get through this. And there was no one … I’m someone who, if I’m going through emotional pain or a struggle, I actually do share it with a lot of people. I’ll be open and because I’m trying to get wisdom and advice from people and figure out how to navigate through this difficult situation. And I was doing that with insomnia. And no one, I didn’t get any … All of the nourishment of the stories on your podcast I was not finding in my community or in the people I was sharing with. So it was just so incredible. I wasn’t finding that perspective anywhere else in my life. So it’s such a huge part of my recovery. I know it’s not even officially part of your program, but that was a huge part of your program for me, is that supplemental listening to the podcast and the interviews. Martin Reed: Yeah, it is kind of amazing, isn’t it? When you listen to some of these episodes, that everyone’s journey is remarkably similar from the start line to the kind of finish line. But the journey itself, like the twists and turns or the direction we take, there can be some little differences there. But broadly speaking, the journey is almost identical from person to person. It’s really interesting, just the whole process from going from the struggle and all the effort to a place where we remove ourselves from that struggle, remove ourselves from the effort, kind of open ourselves up to doing things that we have control over, focusing on our actions rather than getting tangled up in a battle with all the stuff that’s out of our control. And I think it’s really helpful to hear it in lots of different voices and from people with lots of different backgrounds. Because although from person to person the message might be quite similar, we all express ourselves a little bit differently. So you might have heard something said a few times before, but it doesn’t click until someone describes it in a certain way that kind of really resonates with you. And yeah, so it can be so powerful to just hear those stories and just realize that we are not alone, we’re not broken, there’s nothing uniquely wrong and that there is a way to move through this. Jessy Baer: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Martin Reed: Before we kind of move on to that process of transformation, I’m just curious to hear how you were finding that the insomnia was affecting your days, the kind of life that you wanted to live. Because a lot of the time we hear about insomnia being difficult at night, but what a lot of people don’t realize that maybe you’ve never really experienced insomnia before is it’s kind of like this 24-hour-a-day struggle. It’s not just the nighttime. It’s the days that can be difficult too. How is insomnia kind of affecting your days, affecting your waking life, so to speak? Jessy Baer: Yeah, it was hugely affecting my life before I found your podcast. It was really a big shadow over my life. I think as it happened more consistently, I was still living in this community house that was sort of having all this tension but I was still quite attached to. And as I was unable to sleep increasingly more and more, I just felt this kind of filter between me and the world around me and in my future in an exciting life and connection to others. And I just felt isolated from the world and not an active participant in my life, my future, my dreams. I really felt so alone, and I couldn’t get excited about life. I felt my life had been ruined, kind of. And I couldn’t even envision what … I couldn’t even think about my future or anything. And so I remember, it got so bad that I was so attached to this 22-person community, and I didn’t want to leave. I really wanted to stick it out through the conflict and work through and rebuild, because we were bringing in new people and rebuilding the community at that time. And I wanted to be there and participate in that and kind of make that the next chapter of my life. But I felt so I couldn’t do it. And so I actually ended up moving home to live with my parents for a period during COVID, because I just needed support. And it’s one of those things where it was so hard at the time. It was incredibly hard for me to leave my community and move home. But in hindsight, it was a really beautiful thing, because I had this really special period of life living with my parents, which I never would’ve had before. And it was during COVID, so it wasn’t quite as … That was relatively a normal thing to do, and so it didn’t feel as … It didn’t feel like I was totally leaving the youth or young person’s life in the same way. Yeah, and so I moved home with my parents, and still though, that didn’t fix the insomnia. So I moved home with my parents. I was in a more supportive environment with less conflict, and it was more peaceful. I wasn’t in the middle of the city. I thought that was, I guess, another thing I tried. I thought that might fix it, but it didn’t. But it was still nice to be with them, and I did feel kind of safer there. But I think the other thing that started to really affect my life is I really liked my job, actually, at the time. I’m a design strategist. I work at a really cool design agency. And I was actually … I enjoy my job. But I was, because of the insomnia, and my job is a lot of thinking and higher level cognitive tasks, and I was struggling. I was really, really struggling. I was every day to do the things I needed to do for my job, because I was so tired. And I remember I was thinking about, I just needed to quit my job and just really quit my job, live at home, just heal, do nothing. That was kind of my instinct. And I remember talking to my parents, and they were like, if you need to do that, that’s fine. And also, this was meanwhile, I was actually supposed to be launching into something that was even more intense, which is my job. And then I was doing a master’s program in behavioral science, which was supposed to kick off at the same time. That got delayed a year anyway just because of COVID, because it’s in London. It’s like this travel to London thing. But anyway, I was in my head. I was like I can’t even conceive of doing school and my job at this. I can’t even do my job. I am really … The future I had envisioned for myself is so far from reality. And I was single, and I was like I can’t even imagine trying to date in this state. Yeah, so anyway, I’m just kind of rambling, but I do feel like all the dreams and everything I was engaged in, I just kind of felt like I couldn’t do anymore. And it was really unsettling. Martin Reed: Yeah, it is really interesting just to hear you describing all that. Because when we’re faced with all these difficulties, that problem-solving mind, it kind of goes into overdrive. And it tells us all these things that we should withdraw from or we should avoid or that we can’t do. And because our brain is kind of like our best friend, always there for us, always looking out for us, we can often just accept what it says without question. And so it’s telling us, “Maybe you should call in sick, or maybe you should quit your job, or maybe you can’t go out with friends. You can’t go dating. You haven’t got enough sleep.” And so we kind of listen to that, and we can so easily get caught up in it and kind of pushed away from the kind of life we want to live. So now not only are we dealing with that struggle of the insomnia and the wakefulness, but we’re also, we’re kind of withdrawing from all the things that are important to us and that kind of help us live a rich and meaningful life. Jessy Baer: Totally, and that was actually a big aha for me. Because I feel like in my head, if you’re sick or not feeling well, you need to rest. Or that’s the association I had, and so I thought that taking a sick day, that quitting my job, which I liked but didn’t think I could handle, that not going on outings with friends, I thought all these things were ways I could heal and rest. And it was the right thing to do, and so it was a huge aha moment, I think, in your program. And I didn’t hear otherwise. Everybody else supported that. They’re like, “Yeah, take it easy, take a nap, take a sick day.” That was what in my community and parents and everyone, they were so supportive of these things. Because they had the same conception that if you’re sick, you’re not feeling mentally well, you need to rest. And so hearing your podcast and hear and really hearing you confidently say that’s the wrong thing to do, and you should continue to live your full life, and that was a huge aha. Because once I knew that, it really relieved the pressure off sleep, because I realized that I could do these things. And it was nice, because I think before I had had this mixed relationship, because I thought they were maybe hurting me and making it worse, because I was tired and not feeling well. But once the switch in my brain flipped, and after hearing about your techniques, and I started associating being really tired but still going out with friends, being really tired but still going to work, being really tired but not taking a sick day as good and healthy and helping me versus bad and hurting me. It was a really big turnaround. That was a huge turnaround moment. So yeah, anyway, just that was a big, big moment for me. Martin Reed: It’s tricky, right? Because we still want to keep doing things that are important to us, that are meaningful. But at the same time, we are human beings still. And so we still have to mix that in with some self kindness or some self care, kind of acknowledge that, yeah, things are difficult for me right now. Maybe if I’m kind of training for a marathon or something, maybe I won’t go out and do a 20-mile run today. Maybe I’ll just do a 10-mile run, or maybe I’ll just do some work on my training routine or some research on that. So we can still do things that are connected to things that are meaningful and important, even if we might not necessarily feel like up for the whole shebang, just diving right into everything, that really overwhelming schedule after really difficult nights. We can still do things that are connected to what matters, to what’s important. So we can exercise some self care without it completely derailing us and just leading to us withdrawing from life and moving away from the kind of life we want to live. So it is a little bit of a balance. And so I think we do need to be kind to ourselves, recognize that we are human. But as you said, really we got two choices when we are faced with that struggle, is we can give up and withdraw from everything that’s important to us. Or we can see if there’s any way we can continue to do what matters, what we find important, what we find meaningful and enriching just to keep us moving on that path, moving toward the life we want to live, the person we want to be. Because the only possible alternative is moving away from that self, and that doesn’t usually help us over the longer term. Jessy Baer: Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. I think self kindness, sleep or not, it’s just something that is such a big deal to practice. I’ve been actually really trying to work on that in just life in general, because it’s so important. But as you’re saying this, I totally agree. Because when I reflect on my journey, so technically moving home with my parents could have been viewed as a retreat. But actually it was such a good move. I’m very happy I did that. I was in a really fragile state. I really needed that mom and dad nourishment and that home-cooked meal every night and that level of attention and to not be in an environment that had a lot of conflict and was stressful like that. So it’s a good point. It’s like balancing, still doing what you’re going to do but also being kind to yourself and acknowledging you are in … At least for me, I was in a fragile state, and I needed to be in an environment, if possible, that would be a nurturing one. Martin Reed: I think it can be a lot easier, once that stuff is behind us, to reflect back and be like yeah. I did the right thing by trying to stick to what mattered, by still going into work, not calling in sick, going out with friends. But when we’re kind of tangled up in all that struggle, it’s really hard to do things like that. So I’m curious to hear, how were you able to face that? So you went through this process of withdrawing from things or considering withdrawing from things, turned that around and decided no. I’m going to do this stuff anyway. What was that process like, and how did you manage to stay committed to following through on that? Especially when you were feeling really tired or really fatigued or really anxious, really frustrated, dealing with all that difficult stuff that tends to come with insomnia? Jessy Baer: Yeah, that’s a good question, because it is a distinctive space to be to having not slept well. And for me, I mean I think for everybody, but sleep very much affects my emotions. It’s so helpful to realize we can still do everything. And we can still live a full life, even with off nights of sleep. But I really don’t feel oftentimes well after sleeping really, really poorly. And so yeah, how do I battle through that? Because it’s not fun, because you know you’re not feeling well. I think for me, again, just kind of the mantra that this is good and also that I’ll be more tired tonight after this. I think also, I think there’s a couple other things. I think one, I also think about the alternative. And when I’m in that state, just being alone and watching Netflix, that doesn’t make me feel great either. I start ruminating. Things that aren’t just kind of doing, I guess, things that technically are associated with kind of taking a break don’t necessarily help. Because after just if I were to just lie in bed all day and try to read or watch Netflix, I might feel, I’ll probably feel even worse after that, for myself. Some people, that could be nourishing. But for me, I’ll probably just start ruminating more. And then I think a big thing for me that helps, and I think this is different for everybody, but I think being able to be open with how … If I’m doing something social or especially if it’s something social like going out with a friend or even work, though, just being able to be emotionally honest with whoever I’m with and just say, “I’m not feeling well today. I’m excited to be with you and to be here, but I’m not feeling well today.” And maybe share a little bit about what’s going on that’s hard, and I found that really helped, because then I felt just a deeper emotional connection with them. I felt less alone. And even though I was feeling awful, I could still more fully engage in that activity with them. But not everyone can hold that so that I could use that for some people and not others. But that really helped. I think on those off nights, days after off nights, if I could be in environments where I could be a little bit emotionally honest about how I’m not feeling well, I could connect more deeply and get more engaged, even though I wasn’t feeling great. Martin Reed: Maybe it’s connected to acknowledgement, just acknowledging that we are not feeling good and that that’s okay for us not to be feeling good in that moment, and then combining it with still doing things that are important. Sometimes it’s like we swap but for and. So for example, I want to go out, but I feel exhausted. So what if we can change it to, I want to go out, and I feel exhausted. Or I’m going to go out, but I feel exhausted. I’m going to go out, and I feel exhausted. So there’s that difficulty there. There’s that stuff that’s around us, that’s showing up, that we wish wasn’t there. We’re acknowledging that, but then we’re still doing what matters, even though there’s that stuff we wish wasn’t there. Even though that is still present, we’re still able to do what matters and do what’s important, even though it’s there. Jessy Baer: Yeah, I really love that, and. And I think that’s something just in life in general I’m working on, is just realizing that two things that are really different can be true at the same time and that holding space for all that complexity and realizing it can live together and all be true, even though it seems at odds and having a kind heart towards all of it. Because yeah, exactly, I feel awful. I’m going to go out, and yeah. And I think it is good, because I acknowledge. I think for me it makes it, when I can’t acknowledge the emotional truth of I feel awful, it makes it worse. Because then I’m putting all this energy towards masking it, and I’m feeling kind of guilty that I feel awful. And yeah, it makes it way harder. It’s like this double arrow. There’s this Buddhist concept of the single arrow is just feeling awful. And then the double arrow is then feeling bad about it and trying to hide it and all these things. And it’s like, why shoot yourself? It’s like double arrow, just the single arrow is bad enough. So anyway, yeah. It’s nice to be able to acknowledge the really negative feelings that happen during insomnia and just hold them and just not try to pretend like you’re happy in that moment. Martin Reed: So this is probably related, but one thing I was curious to hear from you is because I remember when we were working together. Every now and then, when you’d kind of have some difficult nights coming back, you’d have some good nights. Maybe we’d start to feel a little bit more confident. And then some difficult nights happen, and we find that confidence gets shaky again. Maybe this isn’t going to work. I’m broken. I’m beyond help. All those fear and worries and anxieties and frustrations, all that difficult stuff would start to show up again. How did you start to respond to that arrival of all those thoughts and those feelings that are really difficult and uncomfortable in a different way to … Maybe you had once responded to them in the past. Jessy Baer: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think a big thing that was helpful was sort of separating my thoughts from reality. Or just because it is real, I’m really having these thoughts, doesn’t mean it’s true, doesn’t mean these thoughts are true. So I think there is something nice about separating myself from the thoughts. And to be honest, I think it was. As I mentioned earlier, it was just listening to this in those moments, just listening to your podcast, going on a walk, listening to your podcast, reminding myself, everybody goes through this. And I guess that was it. It was also, so it was one, just realizing these thoughts are just because we think something doesn’t mean it’s true. In our mind, this is a habit, a habit of my mind. But then also realizing that this is a very normal part of the process. Had an off night, that’s normal. It would be not normal to not be having an off night. This is actually the normal, correct, right part of the process. This is not a linear process. I’ve listened to a million interviews. Everyone has talked about various types of this kind of thing happening. So that was also, I think, a big thing, is just really instilling off night is not off. It’s actually on. It’s just normal. That’s actually to be expected. And then just crystallizing that with all the interviews that you had done and really hearing how they all had off nights too. And I think now, so I think that was what I did when I was in the height of the insomnia. And then now I have off nights too. I do think I’m a sensitive sleeper in general, but now I don’t even get worried about off nights at all, because it’s always very … I think about why, and there’s all … It’s normally a stressor. I mean there’s still off nights where I don’t even know why. But a lot of times there’s a reason, and I just don’t even think. I don’t think anything of it anymore. I just know that it’s really, really normal to have off nights. Even people who don’t have insomnia, it’s really, really normal to have off nights, depending on what’s going on in your life. And I’m not religious, but there is something about … Lately I have been doing some kind of spiritual work, I guess. And something I have been trying to cultivate is just a bit more trust and faith in the universe and just the twists and turns of life in general. And I think, I don’t know, that’s a hard thing to quantify. That’s really hard to quantify. But I think just having trust and faith in a more abstract, spiritual sense also helped and just really just trusting in the twists and turns of this weird universe and feeling like something, feeling confident that my growth, it’ll result in my growth in that process, I guess. Martin Reed: You said earlier on that you’re finding that you were practicing separating yourself from your thoughts, and I thought that was a really interesting sentence. I’m curious to hear your thought on what you believe that process to be. Just from what we’ve discussed so far, it sounds to me like the way you were separating yourself from your thoughts involved first acknowledging the thought, allowing it to exist, maybe naming it, noticing it and then maybe asking yourself what it’s saying. Is there some meaning? What’s my mind trying to tell me here? So for example, let’s say we have a job interview, and we’re feeling really anxious about it. Well, what’s our mind telling us? It’s probably telling us that this is important to us, that this is meaningful to us. It’s not trying to sabotage us. There’s probably some information inside that thought that’s useful. And then taking all that in and then deciding, how do we want to respond? Because ultimately, we always get to choose how to respond, and we can respond in a way that maybe isn’t using that information well. So let’s use that job interview. We’re feeling anxious. Okay, I’m feeling anxious, because this is a job that I really want. It’s really aligned with my values and who I want to be, but I’m feeling anxious. Maybe I should call in and cancel it. So we’ve got that choice. We can understand what that thought is telling us and then work in a way that is aligned with the life we want to live. So we still go to that interview even though we feel anxious. Or we can use that information and get pushed away from the life we want to live. We really don’t want to experience that anxiety. So we cancel the job interview and move away from that opportunity. So separate myself and my thoughts. Does that sound like the process that you follow, where you’re acknowledging the appearance of the thought? Maybe not spending forever, but what’s it telling me here? Is it trying to tell me something and then choosing how to respond? Would you say that that’s like that’s the gist of it, or was it different for you? Jessy Baer: Yeah, no, I think it had a lot of those components. I think getting to the emotional truth of the thought, less the words of the thought but more, to your point, what is the emotion? Anxiety, okay, I’m feeling anxiety. Why am I feeling anxiety? I think the other thing is the specific … What helped me a little bit is the specific thought. You’re never going to sleep again. Your life is ruined, those really extreme sort of worst case scenarios, spiraling thoughts. I would also just think back to how many times I’ve had those thoughts, and they’ve not been true and that they’ve been wrong. Because my mind will spiral about things besides just sleep, and I think it really helped for me to also realize this is an unreliable narrator. This is not a reliable sort … This is fake news. It actually is like literal fake news. And so to really just think about how many times I’ve had these thoughts, and they’ve been wrong, and the emotional truth is real. And that’s worth exploring, but that the actual iteration of this thought that is so extreme, so intense, this is fake news type headline grabbing sort of extreme, not accurate information. And that also really helped me personally. Martin Reed: I love that idea of it, of the mind being an unreliable narrator. I think that’s great. When you said that, my mind kind of went to maybe watching a talk show. If we just imagine all of our thoughts as being a talk show presenter, so they might say stuff that’s really helpful, really interesting, stuff we agree with. But at the same time, they’re just as likely to say stuff that’s not really helpful, might be completely inaccurate and might be stuff that we don’t agree with. Jessy Baer: Yeah, and it’s so funny, because it seems negative. But it adds such a relief to me, because I have that about other things too. I’ll have the freakout and just the realization that this is an unreliable narrator. It’s just such a relief. I’m like okay, great. I don’t have to believe everything my mind is telling me. That’s awesome. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think it can just serve as another reminder that even when the mind is generating all this different stuff, ultimately we still get to choose how to respond to it, which is really what it comes down to. And anything that we find a useful way of helping separating us from the mind, separating our actions from our thoughts can be really useful. So I’m sure there’s going to be someone listening here that that’s really going to resonate with them. Just next time I hear all those thoughts come up, I’m just going to imagine that it’s someone narrating something, or it’s a news presenter or something. And some of it might be interesting, useful and helpful. Some of it might not be. I’m going to listen. I’m going to acknowledge. I’m going to listen. Then I’m going to decide how to respond. I’m going to decide what to do with that information. Jessy Baer: Yeah, I love that. Martin Reed: Moving forward a little bit, when we were working together, and you felt like you were starting to feel better with everything that was going on, you felt like you were on the right track in terms of creating better conditions for sleep, responding in a more workable way to the difficult nights and the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with those difficult nights. Then your thoughts started to be maybe it’s time for me to leave my parents, return back to the co-op again. And of course then the mind starts to worry. Well now are we going to be back to square one if we do that? Is sleep going to become a problem again? Even though that process of moving back is probably something that was important to you and more aligned with the life you wanted to live, your mind was going to be generating all this concern about sleep. How did you end up dealing with that situation, that kind of apparent conflict between … I want to do this with my life, but my mind is generating all this concern that if I do do that which is important to me, I’m going to be back to square one, or I’m going to really struggle with sleep again. Jessy Baer: Yeah, so that was kind of a plot twist, actually. And that’s another reason why it’s like these things always feel easier to feel grateful for in hindsight. Martin Reed: Absolutely. Jessy Baer: I was not grateful for my insomnia during it. I thought it was ruining my life, and it was just awful. And I couldn’t, not even an ounce of gratitude. But in retrospect, this is a big pivot for me in a moment where it wouldn’t have happened without the insomnia and moving home. Because actually as I was home, I actually did realize that I didn’t, after a long period of feeling stressed of moving back to the community, I actually realized that I didn’t want to go back. And what I wanted to do was actually buy a condo. And I was feeling strong enough. I was feeling like I was sleeping well. I was feeling strong enough. And I also, I think, had the nourishment of being with my parents for a big life decision like that. And so I actually ended up not going back to the community and actually buying a condo. And now I live alone, and I actually love it. And it’s been a huge life change for me and catapulted me into this really next phase of my life. And honestly I don’t think if it weren’t for the insomnia, moving home, having this long space to, one, heal and reflect. And I think actually the insomnia, getting through that gave me confidence that I could do hard things. And I don’t know. I think it built my resilience and helped pave the way for me to make this decision of buying the condo. I think that the insomnia actually really helped build my confidence in making this next big step in my life. Martin Reed: Did you have any concern when you were exploring that idea of buying a place, living alone? Were there any kind of thoughts or concerns coming up from your mind about, well, what’s this going to mean? What if your sleep problems do come back? What are you going to do then? Maybe we should hold off. Was there any of that kind of stuff going on, or did you just feel like, you know what? I’m just going to do this and not give sleep … Sleep didn’t really come up as a second thought for you. Jessy Baer: No, it definitely came up. No, I was quite afraid. And I think I was especially afraid to return back to the community, which is why I got … I was at my parents maybe seven months. And by the end, I was really ready to leave. It needed to end, because I love them, but it was too much. I needed to be with young people, living my independent life. But I think I was, because I was deeply afraid of it coming back, that kind of kept me there a few months more than probably otherwise. And I’m trying to just reflect back on how I dealt with that. I don’t know, I think it was just kind of through the same things I’ve been saying, just listening to your podcast a million times, just doing your program. I think I also did, actually … I’m just remembering. I think I did some special calls with you, where it felt good. It felt good to know you were there, to be honest. I remember, since that was something I thought about too, is I remember I messaged you. And I was like, “I just want to make sure that I can set up a coaching call with you, if I need. Even though this program is over, if I have a relapse, you’re there, and I can set up a call.” And you were like, “Yes.” And I think just knowing that your program was here and you were here was really grounding. I actually remember thinking that during these moves. I need to build up my toolkit. I need to have these fallback plans. I need to make sure resources are here. I need to make sure I can do a 30-minute call with Martin, if I’m having a regression, and i’m freaking out. Yeah, I think knowing I could set up a coaching call with you at any time or not any time, but that was an available resource I could pull on if needed, was really helpful in the transition. Martin Reed: I know that when we were originally working together, you were still taking the medication. You weren’t quite ready to move away from it yet, but at the same time, it was one of your goals to move away from that. Now I’m curious to hear where you are in that process now. Is this something that you’ve completely moved away from? Is it something that you kind of have as a backup plan? And what was that process like for you of moving away from medication as an option to responding to difficult nights or to somehow try and generate sleep? Jessy Baer: Yeah, that’s a great question. So the medication, so the whole time I was on it, I was so fragile, and I just was so scared of just doing anything that might tip the boat. And the medication, it was Trazodone, it wasn’t Ambien or anything. So it was kind of more of an anti-anxiety medication. So I wasn’t experiencing any really negative side effects. So it wasn’t interfering with my life in any big way except for the fact that I don’t want to be on an anti-anxiety medication if I don’t have to be. I don’t want to just be on this for life. That’s an easy thing to just stay on for life all of a sudden. And it’s like, do I need to be on this? But anyway, because of the fear of just … It was really traumatic with the insomnia, and I just really wanted to be safe. And with the move to my new place and everything, I ended up staying on the Trazodone. Gosh, I think I … over a year. I was just not ready. I was not ready to stop it. And it actually took a pretty big sleep event to get me to get off of it, which is I was doing, as I mentioned, I started this master’s program in London. And there was a period of it where we were supposed to go there for two weeks of classes, but because of COVID, we couldn’t. So I was on this insane schedule of starting class at 3:00 in the morning and finishing class at like- Martin Reed: Wow. Jessy Baer: It was awful. I do not recommend it. It is not a good way to learn. But I was on the schedule of having to start in a statistics class, not even fun class. Trying to learn statistics- Martin Reed: Wow. Jessy Baer: … is the worst. But yeah, so 3:00 AM start. I had to completely change my sleep schedule for two weeks and go to bed at 5:00, wake up at 2:00. It was just wild, but I did it. And I remember after that I was just like I do not need medication. I really feel comfortable that I am at a place of maturity with the sleep. And it’s all me and I feel confident enough to stop this. And I just stopped at cold turkey, and I don’t know if that’s the right way to do it. My doctor is like oftentimes it’s better to taper off. But for me, I was just like, I just want to be done with it. And it was an anti-anxiety medication, so I remember I felt a bit of low feelings, kind of not feeling happy, a little bit of the just comedown of it for a couple days. And I think there were, after that, off nights. And I remember thinking, is it the medication? Is it not? But it’s like no, it was just life. Off nights are normal, and I think I’m so happy that I’ve been off it. I’ve been off it since December. And yeah, I just feel like it would’ve been so easy to just stay on it and have it be something I was on for five years. Because again, it wasn’t really strongly having any super negative side effect. So yeah, but it took a moment of in incredible sleep empowerment to stop it, because it was scary. It was a very scary thing to do. Martin Reed: And I think it’s something we only get from experience, from experiencing that for ourselves, experiencing successfully doing something that’s challenging but important and that’s meaningful but difficult. It can really just be so empowering and help us again recognize that we can still do things that are important, even when we might be struggling with sleep, or we might be struggling with difficult thoughts, or we might be feeling tired and fatigued or feeling like we can’t concentrate. It’s actually quite remarkable, what we can actually achieve. And when we experience that, maybe we realize that we maybe don’t have to put so much pressure on ourselves to get a certain amount or type of sleep or to be feeling or thinking in a certain way in order for that to happen. Jessy Baer: Totally. And as you’re talking, I just remembered one other thing about getting off the medication is I feel proud of myself for getting through insomnia. I feel like empowered by it, except I do feel like when I was on the medication the whole time, it’s like you did all this stuff, but then there’s the medication. And I feel like I couldn’t give myself full credit for all I had done and feel truly empowered in it. Because I was still on this medication, even though I knew the medication wasn’t doing anything. I really could tell it wasn’t doing anything. But still it was robbing me of being able to take full credit for everything I had done. So yeah, that was also just another benefit, just being able to really, fully say I have done this and without medication, or without this kind of lingering thought of, well, I guess I had this other thing too. Martin Reed: We can still practice this new approach, even when we’re taking medication. So that’s one thing, when I’m working with clients, if they’re taking medication, it really doesn’t … I don’t encourage clients one way or another, because to me it doesn’t really matter quite so much. What really matters is, we’re just practicing a new, more workable approach to insomnia. We’re changing our behaviors, practicing new habits, and we can do all that practice, whether we’re taking medication or not. And then once we feel ready, maybe we’ll have that big, insightful moment like you described. Or maybe we just get to that point where we feel ready to make changes. Then we can talk to our doctors and come up with a plan about that. But really the medication isn’t really, doesn’t have to be a hindrance to making changes. What’s important is just practicing making changes, if our current approach isn’t working or isn’t proving to be helpful. Jessy Baer: Yeah, I totally agree. And as I mentioned, I was on the medication over a year, and I needed to do that. I was not ready to come off of it. It was like the thought of it was … I really needed to wait and listen to myself until the thought of going off it wasn’t highly stressful. And at that moment, I was able to. But it was a long, long period, where the thought of going off it was highly stressful. And I think that bringing your “and” again it’s like I was on the medication, and I was doing all this stuff and sleeping really well. That doesn’t have to be something that is an either or with the medication. And I actually remember sometimes I would … Yeah, I was very pro … I felt very good about being on the medication during everything. I didn’t think it was a bad thing. So I guess maybe my ending mark, my ending comment might have made it seem like I thought the medication wasn’t good and was holding me back from full empowerment. But no, I’m such a proponent of just being gentle and kind and bringing in the medication, if necessary. Because it was, for me, quite necessary. And again, I took a long time to get off of it, and I felt okay about that. I felt that was good, that I did that. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve talked about that change in the relationship we have with sleep itself, nighttime wakefulness, all the thoughts and the feelings that come with it, practicing separating our thoughts and our feelings from our actions a little bit, maybe gaining some independence from them. Was there anything else that you can think of, maybe from a behavioral standpoint, any new habits you developed or changes that you’ve made, that we haven’t spoken about ,that you feel were really helpful? Jessy Baer: One is, three things I’m grateful for from the day or three highlights from the day. And I don’t even articulate it very nicely, but I just jot it down. And then I feel like I fall asleep thinking of positive things from the day and feeling more grateful. And I think that helps for me, having that practice every day. It’s really nice reflection at the end of the day before bed. Martin Reed: So what’s an average night like for you these days, Jessy? Jessy Baer: Yeah, an average night for me these days is I eat dinner pretty late, so I’ll probably finish dinner around 9:30, 10:00. And then I’ll go into my room, and from probably maybe 10:30 to 11:30 is wind down time. So I’ll do the same things that you recommended. I still need wind down time, even not having insomnia. I find that period really important, especially if I’ve been out in the evening or done anything. I’ll read a book, mostly. And normally it’ll take … I don’t know, I’ll fall asleep, and then I still wake up in the middle of the night. I’ll wake up a couple times but just like normal, go to the bathroom, fall back asleep. I’ll probably fall asleep by 12:00 and normally I’ll just sleep eight hours, and it’s just normal cycle of sleep, typically. Martin Reed: How about your days? Any changes there since you’ve got to this point where insomnia is kind of more behind you in the rearview mirror rather than right in front of your face, blocking your view of the entire world around you? Jessy Baer: Overall, I think the biggest thing that’s impacted me, which we’ve already discussed, is that if I’m not feeling well, regardless of whether it’s sleep, maybe it’s just other things that have been upsetting, or I’m just feeling depressed or anxious or whatever. I still do the things that I had scheduled, or I still plan to do things. And for me that really … And I think this is good for me. I think this is a good way to work through these, this negative, not feeling well state. And that, I think, has really helped for me personally in my life. And again being kind, not doing anything aggressive and just forcing myself to do hard things when I’m not ready. But I think overall, just the mentality of, if you’re feeling low, whether it’s sleep or otherwise, getting out and doing stuff tends to help. That’s actually a good thing. That’s definitely helped improve my life, I think. Martin Reed: Great. Well Jessy, I’m really grateful for all the time that you shared to come on and share your story. Like we were talking about earlier, they’re so helpful for everyone listening. And I just know that everyone listening to this is going to be taking something away from our conversation. So I’m really grateful for you coming on and sharing your experience. But I do have one last question for you, which I would be really grateful for you to answer, if you’ve got a few more minutes to spare. And it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening, and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re just beyond help, they feel like they can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Jessy Baer: First, I would just say, you are not alone. You are not alone. There’s so many people in the exact same situation who feel the exact same way. And it’s a really normal situation that a lot of people are grappling with. And two, just as much as you can, trust in the process and just the ups and downs, the twists and turns, the unexpected moments. Just trust in the process, and you will move through this insomnia episode. And you will, I think, do really well and just trust. Martin Reed: All right, well I think that’s a great note to end on. So thanks again, Jessy, for taking the time out for your day to come on and share your stories. Really appreciate it, thank you. Jessy Baer: I’ve so appreciated hearing all the stories on your podcast. As I’ve mentioned, they’ve been life changing for me. So I’m so grateful I could come on and share mine. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

A couple of years ago, Maria experienced anxiety and panic attacks. When she didn’t sleep for over 72 hours, she felt that something was wrong with her. She feared that the chemistry of her brain had changed and her days became dominated by sleep-related thoughts and worries. Medication didn’t seem to help. Maria felt lonely, confused, and afraid. She felt that she couldn’t even leave the house because things were so difficult. She withdrew from doing things that she enjoyed. She found it hard to focus on anything other than sleep. Feeling completely stuck, Maria committed to a new approach. She started to leave the house and went for short walks — even when her mind told her that wasn’t possible. Taking baby steps, she started to do more of the things that mattered to her. Perhaps the most helpful change Maria made was facing the fear of insomnia. Instead of trying to fight or avoid insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings associated with it, Maria started to allow it to exist. She would even start to welcome it, whenever it chose to show up — and, by doing this, Maria found that insomnia started to lose its power and influence. She soon discovered that she didn’t need medication to generate sleep. That she didn’t need to do anything to make sleep happen. And, that trying to fight or avoid insomnia and the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with it only set her up for an ongoing struggle that made everything more difficult. Maria realized that insomnia’s survival depends on how we respond to it. And, she is 100% sure that with the right approach, no matter how bad your situation might be right now, you can recover. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay, Maria, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Maria Koziol: Absolutely, no problem. My pleasure. Martin Reed: I’m really excited to have you on. Let’s just start right at the beginning. When did your sleep problems begin and what do you think caused those initial issues with sleep? Maria Koziol: If we’re talking about the trigger, I think it was a very complex case. There was not a singular cause or trigger that I could point out. I think I haven’t even been able to recognize it yet, like 100%, what was that? I just think it all started at the point when I actually started to have different mental health problems. That was at the beginning of 2021 when all of a sudden, I started to have panic attacks and anxiety attacks, when I had never ever experienced such things before. I was trying to figure out why at that time, why the beginning of 2021? I hadn’t had any major tragic events at that time, so this is still kind of a mystery to me. But I talked about it with my psychotherapist and we’ve come to the conclusion that it must have been for the reason that I’ve had a lot of personal issues that were like, I didn’t really have a chance to talk about them so they accumulated over time. And then on top of that, we had COVID, the outbreak of COVID. I had to experience loneliness and detachment from environment at that time. Also, problems with work as well because I wasn’t sure if I’m going to be able to keep my position at work, because of COVID. So I think there was a lot of different things that started all of my problems, and insomnia came along with it. Insomnia came around beginning of 2021. That’s how I would describe the beginnings, how I would describe the trigger. I know it doesn’t really point out any specific trigger, but it’s kind of hard for me to say, to be honest. Martin Reed: I think everyone’s experience is a little bit different there. Some people have this really clear and obvious pinpoint and they know exactly when it began, what caused it. For other people, it can be a bit mysterious. The trigger itself is usually less of an issue. It’s more to do with how we’re responding to that sleep disruption when it turns up. So when all this difficulty arrived, what was sleep like for you? What was a typical night like if there was such a thing? Maria Koziol: I would have long streaks of not sleeping, and the longest I had was I think more than 72 hours when I didn’t sleep for the whole three or four days. At this point, I was absolutely anxious and freaked out. I hadn’t really slept. That was the longest streak of not sleeping for me in my whole life, so at that very point, I thought that something must be wrong with me. And I’ve heard a lot of people on your podcast saying the same, so I also could identify with them because when insomnia comes to your life, you feel as though something must be wrong with you. How can you not sleep? All of the other people are sleeping. How can you just lose your ability to sleep? I just felt as though something in my brain, like chemistry of my brain, has changed permanently, and I was super anxious about that. So, how would my sleep look like? I had the long streaks of not sleeping and then following that, I would have maybe a microdose of sleep the next night, like two hours, and then another streak of not sleeping like two days, and then maybe again two hours of sleep. Sometimes I had five, six hours of sleep during this period, but then it would usually be followed by, again, not sleeping or sleeping in micro doses. So that was a nightmare, I remember that so well. I could lay for hours in bed and just focus so much on trying to get asleep that it never happened. The more I focus on trying to fall asleep, it never ever happened. I would usually spend hours and hours tossing around, tossing over in bed. Martin Reed: What about your days? Were you finding this difficulty, the struggle with sleep was affecting your days as well? Maria Koziol: Yeah, of course. At the beginning when this was all new to me, the insomnia thing happened so suddenly and I was so disorientated, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was so confused about all of this especially since before, I had never struggled with sleep, ever. I would fall asleep very easily anywhere, so that was all the more strange. About my days, I would be all shook up and I could cry over simple things, like a glass would break and I would burst out in tears. I was even shouting at my family members for no reason. I was crying. I was super emotional. Physically-wise, I was able to function normally. I could even go work out, to be honest, but the only thing stopping me from that was that my mind wouldn’t stop running around the thought if I will be able to sleep that night or not, or how I didn’t sleep the last night. My whole day was dominated by the sleep thing because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Regardlessly of what was going on in my life, even if maybe I won lottery, I couldn’t probably be even enjoying that because I would be still thinking about how I am not able to sleep that night. That was manipulating my whole way of thinking. I felt like I couldn’t be really enjoying the activities I used to enjoy as well anymore. And to be honest, I think the worst part of it was the loneliness that came along with it. The feeling of being alone and the feeling of your family members and friends not having a smallest clue about what you’re going through because they have never experienced insomnia. I know they have been trying to help me and comfort me, but they had no idea about what I was going through. My mom would usually tell me, “Okay, don’t worry. If you didn’t go sleep that night, you would probably go sleep the next night.” And I’m like, “But you don’t get it. I wasn’t sleeping for three days, what if I die?” No one could actually understand me. No one could relate to it, because none of my friends ever experienced insomnia, none of my family members ever experienced insomnia, so the feeling of loneliness that no one actually understands you, that was also a very big part of how I felt during the day, if that makes sense? Martin Reed: Yeah, it makes complete sense, and I’m sure it’s going to make complete sense everyone listening to this as well. You mentioned that physically, you felt like I could probably still work out or still do activities that I had planned or that are important to me, but at the same time, your mind is like, well, can you still do that? Do you have energy to do it? Are you going to enjoy it? Are you going to be able to focus on it? How did you actually end up responding? Did you still do things that you had planned or did you start to withdraw from those kind of activities because of all this mental chatter that was going on? Maria Koziol: Yeah. Of course, before I met you and your content, I would definitely withdraw from everything. I would stop doing what I liked. I would stop even leaving house because I felt like absolute waste, and I just refrain to do anything. I just did the bare minimum all day. And by the way, I couldn’t really focus on anything else other than thinking if I will sleep today. At the same time, because I was so obsessed about the sleep thing, and I’m very emotional and expressive person so I would usually say to people very sincerely what is in my mind instead of actually keeping that inside me. So I would tell all my family and friends about how I feel and about what I’m going through, and then I noticed people started to withdraw from me as well because I couldn’t stop talking about just one thing and they were fed up with this, which I do understand right now. But at that time, it was also very disappointing for me because I felt like they didn’t want to hang out with me anymore because all I could talk about was sleep, and the lack of sleep. I started to lose friends at this point. Of course, not family, but my family would also be kind of… I felt as though I shouldn’t really talk to them about this anymore because they didn’t express this explicitly, but I felt like they’re also fed up and helpless because I would usually talk, call my mom and cry over the phone how I can’t sleep, but she couldn’t do anything. She was just like, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I don’t know how to help you.” So, that was quite serious at that time. Before I actually met you and your content, I was completely lost with this. Martin Reed: Did you find that by taking that approach you did actually start to feel better? Or did you feel about the same? Or did it tend to make things more difficult? What was your actual experience like? What were the results of withdrawing and doing less? Maria Koziol: The results of actually withdrawing and doing less, I would just be stuck in the bubble of thinking about sleep. I would spend all my day in bed and freak out at the thought of the moment when I will have to go to bed. And I remember, whenever it was becoming darker outside, I would freak out completely because that means it’s the nighttime, so this is my nightmare time. This is where I will be suffering for the next seven, eight hours while everybody else will be asleep. Basically all my days would be staying in bed, working from bed as well on my laptop because I do have this possibility to work remotely. However, I wouldn’t even go for a walk. I wouldn’t do anything. It almost felt like I was stuck in a bubble and not do anything, and just await this nightmare coming in the evening. Martin Reed: When you picked up on this idea that we talk about a lot on these podcast episodes of trying to still do some of the stuff that matters, what were your thoughts on that? Were you thinking, no, that just sounds impossible? Or were you thinking, I’m going to give it a try? What was your response to that idea and how did you go about changing to start reintroducing daily activities back into your life? Maria Koziol: I think if I had heard it from a very random person, like my friend, like, “Hey, go enjoy your activities and still try to enjoy your life anyway,” I would think this person has no idea what they’re talking about. This is absolutely stupid and I’m not going to do it. They don’t know what risk is involved. But when I heard it from you, of course I studied your content before and you were a very reassuring and convincing person for me, also with a very, very huge knowledge about the topic and certified as well, so you were very convincing for me. So when I heard it from you, I thought, if he’s saying that, I need to try it, because it did sound a little bit, hmm, I’m not sure if it’ll work for me, but I still wanted to give it a try. That was my approach when I heard it from you. Probably might have been different if I heard it from someone super random, like my friend or someone who I met on the street. Martin Reed: And what was that process like for you? Did you take little baby steps, maybe start by getting outside each day, or did you just dive right in and try to do everything as though insomnia didn’t exist? I’m curious to what your approach was. Maria Koziol: As far as I recall, I think that was more like baby steps. I started with going out for a walk, going to the shop instead of ordering a delivery, just walking a dog out. And then it came to the point when after two weeks, I was actually meeting my friends out in the restaurant, which was inconceivable for me at the very beginning because after the night of not sleeping, I was like, that’s not possible. That’s not possible to meet anyone. That’s absolutely not happening. And then I actually saw that it is possible. Okay, you won’t be your best form, you won’t be all shiny and glamorous, but friends wouldn’t even notice. To be honest, when I showed up without the night of sleep, no one would even notice that I wasn’t sleeping. No one even said anything. I looked normal and I kind of behaved normal as well. At this point I started to realize that if they didn’t notice that, I think it’s actually worth going out. No one will notice that anyway, so let’s just continue doing that. That’s basically how it went, I think from the baby steps up until the huge steps. Martin Reed: Did you find that it was really hard at first to get yourself outside, going for walks, being in social situations again? Or did you find that straight from day one, for example, as soon as you started to do stuff like that, you noticed that this was kind of an approach that was maybe more helpful, compared to doing less stuff? Maria Koziol: The very beginnings, it felt awkward, but I knew I was doing this to improve my situation so I did really have a lot of hope related to it. It did feel a bit awkward and difficult at the very beginning, but it got easier and easier over time. Logically if you see something is working, you trust it even more and you go into it deeper, so that was how it looked like for me, if that makes sense? Martin Reed: Absolutely. Were you finding that your brain was generating all different stories about this or thoughts that maybe weren’t very helpful? Maybe it was telling you things like, so you went for a walk today, that might have felt good today, but are you going to be able to do it tomorrow? Is this going to work? You can’t do this. Maybe let’s stay at home. Did you find lots of thoughts and stories like that turning up? Maria Koziol: Definitely. Yeah, exactly. I’m even surprised you’re saying this as though you were reading my mind at the time. I would always question myself after… There would be positive thoughts and two seconds after, these little demonic thoughts that are like, fine, you can do it today, what about tomorrow? You shouldn’t be doing this. It’s not good for your health. So definitely, I did have a lot of these thoughts. It was super, super difficult to overcome them. It was a constant battle in my head. It was about questioning my actions all the time in my head. Yeah, definitely. Martin Reed: I think it’s interesting that you feel like I just accessed your brain there and pulled out those stories, even though we haven’t talked about this before this episode, and just because that’s how the human brain is wired. It generates thoughts like that, stories like that. Ironically, as it’s doing its job of trying to look out for us, it’s trying so hard, it’s being a little bit unhelpful and getting in the way. And it can be a little bit like these maybe two little mini brains, one on each shoulder. One is kind of reassuring, and yes, you can do this, and the other one’s like, are you sure you can do this? Maybe you can do it now, but what about tomorrow? And so we are kind of caught in the middle of that. But I think where it can be so helpful, the process you described, even if it is baby steps, just kind of reintroducing stuff, doing stuff again, especially things that are important to us and meaningful to us, is we can prove to ourselves that even when our brain is doing whatever it wants to do, helpful thoughts, unhelpful thoughts, true thoughts, false thoughts, whatever it’s doing, whatever it’s churning out, we can still control the body. We can still choose how we respond to those thoughts. So even if the brain says, you cannot go for a walk today, you’re too tired. Physically, we can still stand up, put our shoes on and go out of the door. That’s another reason why I think it’s helpful to start getting active again, is because we recognize and reinforce this idea that no matter what our brain is telling us, we still get to choose to respond. And every time we respond in a way that’s helpful or workable, we’re reminding ourselves of that. And maybe we are less likely to get tangled up in trying to battle with our mind because after all, do we need to battle with our mind when we are constantly reminding ourselves that we can respond however we like, regardless of what the mind is doing? Maria Koziol: Yeah, absolutely. Martin Reed: Just rewinding a little bit, you talked about when the sleep disruption first turned up, one way you tried to deal with it, which is completely understandable, is to do less because you just feel, this is overtaking my life, I don’t have the energy to do anything. I don’t look right, I’m going to make mistakes, all of that difficult stuff. What other things had you tried in an attempt to improve your sleep to get things back on track, that now you’re able to look back, maybe weren’t effective or weren’t quite so helpful? Maria Koziol: The first thing I can list were medications. There was a lot of medications that only worsened my state at the very end. I was taking Zolpidem at some point, even SSRI. Then once sleeping pills stopped working because I was very quickly addicted to them… When I think about it back two years ago, it’s just so dreadful to think when I saw this pack of pills, I was running to them just to take it, like I couldn’t wait for the moment to take these pills. And never in my life I thought I could be addicted to something, and then it turns out I’m so easily addicted to these pills. So I got freaked out and I called my psychiatrist and I told them, “Hey, can we get off these pills? I’m just frightened about how it might end up because I feel like I’m super addicted. And by the way, they’re not working anymore because my tolerance went up. I started off with half of the pill and now I need to take two, which is not even an allowed dose, I think.” My psychiatrist, they started to prescribe me even weirder things like antipsychotic medication that was used for treatment of schizophrenia, for example. I think it was called quetiapine, something like that. It was an absolute disaster. I was going for holidays and then my whole suitcase will be filled up with different types of antipsychotic medication, sleeping pills. I felt as though I just walked out of a psychiatric ward. It was a absolutely terrible experience and it lasted for a couple months that I was taking the pills. None of these pills actually worked. With the sleeping pills, they helped me fall asleep initially, of course, but afterwards, I would just need more and more to fall asleep. If I stopped taking them, I was in an even worse place that I was before starting to take them. That was not a solution to the problem, not at all, and I kind of blamed the psychiatrist for that as well because they knew that they shouldn’t have been prescribing me this as a long-term solution. And even though they knew it perfectly because it’s an obvious fact, it’s a short-term solution for insomnia, not a long-term, they kept prescribing me this all the time. Whenever I asked, no questions, just give her the pills, get her off my phone and give her the pills. So it wasn’t working anymore, and not to mention that I started to feel super, super depressed the day after. And then I started reading articles about how Zolpidem is linked to creating depression. There were even cases studied of people that committed suicide and didn’t struggle with any mental health issues before taking Zolpidem. I think it’s very important to mention that because it’s never going to do any good. Pills are never the solution for insomnia. I think it would never do any good, long-term. Short-term, yes, they’re working, but it’s just for a limited period of time and then you would need more. You would get addicted. You would develop other things like depression maybe as a side effect, which I started to develop, because I was also scared that they might have influenced my brain chemistry long-term somehow. Some medication, psychiatrist, I would usually call different psychiatrists like three times a week. It was a very helpless cry for help, and I never felt as though they would really listen to me. I just felt as though they take notes, prescribe something, and you would never hear from them again. When I tried to outreach to them, I remember they prescribed me this SSRI, I’m not sure what was that exactly? I can’t recall now. But they prescribed me the SSRI and then I took it, and it was like five milligrams. How I felt, I can’t even describe it. I was super scared about how I’m feeling so I immediately called the doctor and I was trying to get in touch with him like, “Hey, please help me. I’m scared. I don’t know what’s going on with my body. I feel as though my receptors are not working.” I couldn’t even read an email. I was taking my pen and going with my pen to my fridge. It felt absolutely odd, so I tried to call them. They didn’t pick up, or they said to me, “Okay, you can schedule an appointment in a week. I can’t give you anything right now.” So there was no support from them. I felt as though they would just prescribe me pills and didn’t care what happened to me afterwards. So, that were the things that I’ve tried and they only had a detrimental impact on my mental health. Martin Reed: I’m curious to know, all the doctors that you spoke to, did anyone suggest alternatives to medication or offer you any advice as to how you might be able to deal with this without taking medication, or even make some changes while taking medication that might also prove to be helpful? Or were you just only offered medication as the only option that was available to you? Maria Koziol: Yeah. Most of them would actually only prescribe me pills without mentioning any other recourse. Some of them were pointing out at the CBT-I therapy. Some of them were like, “Here are the pills, but make sure you actually sign up for the therapy because this is a long-term solution.” So yeah, some of them did, but I feel like most of them were just prescribing pills without mentioning anything else. Martin Reed: When you heard about CBT-I, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, was that something that you’d heard of before? Is it something you explored or looked into? Were you able to research anything about that? Maria Koziol: Not specifically for insomnia. I knew that kind of therapy existed. However, I would more link that to depression, for example, and not really to insomnia. I’ve never heard of treating insomnia with that before, to be honest, so that was new to me. But at the time, I already actually met you and your content. I had you, so I didn’t really have to have any other help because it was helping to have your content to read and listen to you every day. Martin Reed: Let’s talk a little bit now about what happened next on your journey, the new approach that you explored. What were some changes that you made that you are now able to look back on and think that this was really what helped me start moving away from struggling with insomnia and started to create better conditions for sleep, reduce the influence it had over my life? Where did that start? You’ve already mentioned starting to do more things, be more active during the day. What other behavioral changes, new habits or old habits did you bring back that you’ve found to be particularly helpful? Maria Koziol: I remember after I’ve seen your video where you were talking about how we are never going to lose the ability to sleep, that was a milestone in my process because for some reason, that was so simple but it sounded so reassuring for me and convincing that I just trusted you 100%. And from the day I saw that video, I would usually also replay it in the next days as well. But from this moment, I just thought, he’s right, it’s true. I shouldn’t be freaking out about this, and you also provided some kind of evidence or lack of evidence that chronic insomnia can cause any health problems. There was no evidence of that as well. I feel like from this point, it all started to change. First of all, I stopped obsessing about whether I’m going to go to sleep tonight or not. The method I have used, I would describe it as facing the fear or facing the pain. Previously, before I heard your video about what I just said, I would usually freak out when the night was coming, the bedtime was coming. I would run away from the fear. And the thing with fear is that when you run away from it, it gets bigger and bigger and holds you like a monster, but when you face it, it shrinks. So I know it may sound very odd to someone who didn’t apply this, but I applied this method in my life when it comes to insomnia and panic attacks, and it really works. It really works. When you face the fear, it just shrinks, and over time, it actually disappears. And the same applies to insomnia. There’s something I read recently in a book, and it said, it stuck in my head, it said that pain and fear is not absolute, and your experience of fear and pain changes relative to how you react to it. And I think it’s perfect to describe the attitude we should have to insomnia. That is a great things to say, I’m not sure if you will agree with me, but this simple method I think has actually cured me. Your reaction to insomnia is something that essentially is the most important thing. It is all about how you react to this. And then once I understood it, of course, it wasn’t like, oh, I just started applying this method that I was cured the other day. No, of course not. It took time. It took quite a lot of time to apply it 100%. But over time, I really stopped fearing the lack of sleep, stopped fearing the nighttime. Even though I wasn’t sure if I’m going to fall asleep, I would remind myself of the video you posted and I was like, okay, cool. Well, I won’t die anyway. I won’t sleep, but that’s it. I won’t die. Nothing bad will happen. I will live. Nothing bad will happen. And then I was able to change my thoughts over this. Of course, the bad thoughts would always pop up again. They would always try to devaluate what I was just saying to me. It takes time, of course. It’s not going to be overnight change, but it really works. It really works. When you maybe stop fearing insomnia, it’ll eventually vanish, evaporate because it will have no force over you. It will just lose its forces. About the behavioral changes, what I mentioned so far, I started going out more, doing more activities, but I really started to not care anymore about sleep. I was like, well, I might not fall asleep this day, but it will not kill me. I will live, I not die, and there’s no proof someone ever died from lack of sleep. That was the same with my panic attacks. That was the same treatment that I used, and I was able to overcome them as well. I was like, okay, cool. I’ll have a panic attack, but there’s just a sensation. Nothing is actually physically happening in my body. It’s just a sensation of your thoughts and what’s going on in your head. There’s not nothing endangering your life at this point. So I think that was super relieving, this knowledge that the less you care, that the less powerful insomnia will become. I would say that was maybe my behavioral approach. Martin Reed: Do you remember the title of the book that you just shared that quote from? Just think people might be interested. Maria Koziol: Yeah, of course. That book wasn’t about insomnia, by the way, but I feel like it’s kind of connected to the way of how you might treat insomnia and anxiety and panic attacks, so it’s great. It’s called The Tools and the author is Phil Stutz. I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing his surname in a correct way, but the book is called The Tools. You can buy it on Amazon. Martin Reed: Going back to this idea of facing the fear, if someone’s listening to this and they think, I think this is something that I want to try. I want to face this fear. I want to face this fear of insomnia. I want to face the fear of what tonight might bring. How do we actually go about facing that fear? If you were to give someone a list of actions to take that might help them face the fear, what might that look like? How do we implement that in practice, do you think? Maria Koziol: I know it’s super difficult. It’s very, very difficult even describe or maybe implement at the very beginning, but I promise you it’s doable. What I would usually do is… Let’s try to imagine that you won’t fall asleep again tonight. Try to imagine that you’re laying in bed for four or five hours, everyone else is asleep, but you’re struggling and the next day is just waiting in a few hours. You’ll need to live through the next day, but you didn’t have any sleep. Imagine you’re in that situation and let this thought be in your body, flow through your body and just say to yourself, bring it on, I want to experience this. I want to experience the worst that can happen. Bring it on. I’m ready. And you know what? When I said it to myself, I would feel like I actually get less anxious, and then I felt like a bit more powerful. I would stop thinking about it. I’m like, I’m going to continue right now with my day. I’m going to go relax, watch TV. Then if I’m going to go to bed and the sleep doesn’t happen, I’m ready for it. I’m 100% ready for it, and I’m not going to be freaked out. I know it’s super difficult for people that are suffering with insomnia because they feel as though they’re dying, that they’re so desperate. I know where you are. I promise you, I’ve been there. It’s absolutely dreadful, but there’s hope. There’s always a way out, and you can do that. You can’t die from it, I promise you. There’s no way you can die from it. Nothing can happen to you. I’m sorry, I don’t really have instruction on how to actually apply this. It’s so difficult. I think it’s the battle that you need to have with your thoughts. Martin Reed: I think really what you described is moving away from the struggle, so moving away from trying to make sleep happen, trying to remove certain thoughts and feelings from your brain, but taking an approach where you’re acknowledging everything that you are thinking, everything that you are feeling, and you’re becoming maybe more of an observer instead of someone that’s trying to fight it. Or at the very least, you’re kind of removing the dam that you might be trying to build to stop all of that stuff arriving. But what happens when we build a dam? It all accumulates behind that brick wall and eventually it all comes overflowing anyway. I think what you’ve described is moving away from that struggle, just allowing this difficult stuff to exist, especially if your experience anyway tells you that you can’t really get rid of it, and just allowing it to flow through you, as difficult as that might be. Maria Koziol: I know, exactly, but it’s actually really working. It was the same for my panic attacks. When I first heard this method, I was like, I’m not sure if it’s going to work but let’s try it. When I had a panic attack and when I would try to calm down, it would only get worse, always. And then once I remember, I was on the airplane and that was a very long flight, like 11 hours, 12 hours, I had a huge panic attack on the plane. That was so frightening to the point that I was actually about to exit the plane, like at the boarding, I was about to actually tell the flight attendant, “Sorry, I think I’m not going because I can’t… I have a panic attack.” But I said to myself, you’re going to get through this. It happened to you a lot of times. It’s not going to kill you, it never killed you. And then the panic attack came, and instead of trying to calm down as I would usually do, like oh my God, I need to calm down. Everybody will notice. Oh my God, nobody can notice that. I just felt as though this is normal. You’re just having a panic attack. Feel it, bring it on. I want to feel it even more. Just try to feel it with all of your body. Let it let this feeling flow through you and it will actually calm down after a while, after three, two minutes. And the same was with my insomnia. Let’s say that it was bedtime and it was like midnight, then 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM, I’m still not sleeping. Normally, at the very beginning, I would freak out. I would be watching my clock all the time and just getting crazy, whereas after applying this method of not avoiding the fear and just facing it, I was rather laying in bed and thinking, well, that’s okay. Eventually I’m probably going to fall asleep, even if it’s microdose. I’m just going to watch a movie right now. There’s nothing bad happening. I’m just going to watch a movie and let the bad feeling flow through my body. I’m not sleeping well. Okay, what can I do about this? Nothing. This is how I try to explain this to myself. And you need to remember, the bad thoughts will always pop up. Even sometimes they will try to devaluate what you are thinking, and they will try to push you away from your path, but those are just thoughts. Those are just thoughts. They will always pop up. It’s just thoughts. I think that would be my advice. Martin Reed: There’s just so much great stuff there. I’m curious to hear, I think you already mentioned this, but even taking this approach of facing the fear, allowing the difficult thoughts and feelings to show up, allowing the possibility of insomnia to show up, it’s not like, I’m going to do this and then all of a sudden all these difficult thoughts permanently disappear, and all of a sudden you’re having great nights of sleep again. I’m curious to know what the process or the timeline was like for you? Was this something that you found that you had to practice for days, weeks, or even months in order to notice that it was helping? I’m just curious to hear what timeline from your own experience? Maria Koziol: To be honest, that was when I started using this method. The behavioral change, that was quick. That was like a few days and I was back on track with my sleeping. I was like, wow, I slept seven hours. Wow, it really worked. But then when I had a bad night after a few days, I would have a rebound of anxiety like, ah, you see, it’s actually not working. So my bad thoughts would tell me, ha ha, you are so confident, but you’re never out of this. You’ll be stuck with insomnia for the rest of your life, and there’s no cure for you. I would have a rebound sometimes, but then I would again apply the method of what we were talking about just now, and then it would again improve for a few days, where I would have a rebound as well and then I would apply this and that would improve as well. So I would say that it took me… To fully recover from insomnia, is that what you’re asking for? Or just right after applying the method? Martin Reed: I would say, maybe where you got to a point where you felt, I’m free of it, I’m independent. I can live my life independently of how I sleep. I’m not so much tangled up in the struggle. It’s not something that has a big influence over my life anymore. Maria Koziol: I feel like that would be maybe a month or so when I got this confidence about, I’m actually able to recover from insomnia. But at this point, I was sure that it would at some point come back, but then I had the tools to defend myself and to approach it in a right way. I think the very, very big lesson for me was something that you’ve been talking about a lot in your podcast and in your content on YouTube, that the most important thing is actually your approach to the sleep and your approach to insomnia, and how you react to it will essentially influence how it will develop. So, that was something that was super big lesson for me, the attitude. When I started having insomnia, when it happened in my life, my attitude was anxious fighting. I was super confused. I was freaked out. I was battling the thoughts all the time. I was trying to fight the fact that I’m not sleeping, forcing myself to fall asleep, which is impossible to do it. With pills, it’s possible, but there’s no way you can force yourself to sleep. So my initial approach to that, my reaction to insomnia was completely fighting with that. And then when I changed to accepting it and just acknowledging it, it was shrinking more and more, and eventually it disappeared. Martin Reed: I like that way you said that it felt like it was shrinking and shrinking, because one of my favorite analogies about the insomnia struggle is we have this big scary thing called insomnia, and we want to fix it, we want to get rid of it, so we want to study it to figure it out so we can get rid of it. So we might pick up a magnifying glass, and we’ve got the insomnia here, and we are just staring at the insomnia through this magnifying glass. And of course, when we look through a magnifying glass, that thing is really big. And when we are focused just on looking through the magnifying glass, we don’t see anything else around us. All we see is that thing that we’re staring at. I think when we start to move away from the struggle, it’s like instead of prodding and poking at this thing under the magnifying glass, what we’re actually doing is putting the magnifying glass down. So the insomnia might still be there, but now because we put the magnifying glass down, our field of view is so much bigger. We can now see the world around us. We might be better able to engage in the world around us, and we free up our attention to do more of the things that matter rather than everything being consumed by what we see through that magnifying glass. I just think that aligned with what you were saying, where it kind of shrunk. That’s just what reminded me of that. When we’re able to recognize that this thing is here, maybe I can’t directly get rid of it, but what I can do is dilute it by adding other things to my life, doing good stuff. It starts to lose its influence, so it feels like it gets smaller. And even when it’s present, if something loses its influence over us, maybe then it becomes less of a problem that we feel we need to address. And when it comes to sleep and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that can come with it, the less engaged we are with trying to control that stuff, the more it’s able to take care of itself and get back on track by itself. Maria Koziol: Definitely. It’s so true because I felt like I just disempowered insomnia by taking away the importance of it. At some point, I just started to ignore it, like the screaming of insomnia, just ignored it and I felt like it devaluated the whole thing and then it becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, and eventually actually disappeared. Martin Reed: One thing you touched upon was that you’re not using sleeping pills anymore. I’m curious to hear what your process was to moving away from them, because sometimes it feels like they’re the only thing that we have available to us, that maybe we need them, otherwise no sleep is going to happen. Or we need to always have them as an option, just in case. What was that process like for you in terms of moving away from them and not even having them available anymore? Maria Koziol: I feel like it lasted very long until I actually was able to stop taking them. That lasted for months, maybe half a year. By that time, I already developed addiction to the sleeping pills. The moment I threw them all away, I remember even flushing them off in the toilet because what happened is that I really started to… I’m very sensitive person in terms of emotional intelligence, so I can very easily recognize when what I’m feeling is being influenced by external object or is it my own feeling. And then after taking those pills the next day, I would feel as though I was on drugs, I was depressed, the feeling of depression. I can’t recognize… I used to have my sad moments. Of course, everybody has them. Some maybe depressive thoughts a little bit, but those thoughts were different. This was feeling as though I started to have depression. It was like everything was so vain. I felt like I would like to start crying, and it was so strange for me. I never felt that way before, so I immediately linked this to the sleeping pills because I knew this wasn’t mine. I never had this feeling before. At this point, I was so scared. I was super scared about my mental health at this point and I said to myself, okay, this is the point where I need to say goodbye to the sleeping pills. However difficult this is going to be, I can’t do this anymore because it started to have a super detrimental impact on my mind and I couldn’t allow it anymore. I just felt like, no, it can’t happen. I can’t deal with depression on top of that, it can’t happen. So, that was my trigger, the point where I decided goodbye, sleeping pills. I can’t. Martin Reed: Maria, I’m really grateful for you coming on and giving up your time to share your experience. I know that a lot of people are going to find your experience really helpful, hopefully as well, hopeful, and just giving people the possibility and the reassurance that we can get out of this struggle no matter how difficult things feel. But I do have one last question for you, which is one that I ask everyone that comes on, and it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they’ll never be able to stop struggling with insomnia, what would you say to them? Maria Koziol: I came from the point where once I even almost overdosed on sleeping pills and I drank alcohol as well. That was when I was on holidays. I think I was just so hopeless and so desperate and all the things you can imagine how I felt.It wasn’t just for clarity, it wasn’t like it was a suicidal thing. I didn’t want to do it. It’s just that I would do anything to fall asleep, so I just had a bunch of pills and I took like five or six pills at once and I drank a bottle of wine before, anything to fall asleep. I just wanted to fall asleep. I’m very lucky and grateful that I’m still here today, but you see at what point in my life I came from, what point I was in. That was absolutely a nightmare and I almost killed myself. Where I am now, I don’t have insomnia anymore. I can sleep without any pills, without nothing. So, just wanted to say it as a word of hope for anybody that could be listening to that because it doesn’t matter what state you are in right now, maybe you’re taking a lot of pills daily as well, you are able to get out of it. There’s always hope. You can always do it. And definitely, you’re going to recover from insomnia. Remember that you are not alone and there’s millions of people experiencing the same thing, even though you don’t see them around you, but they are there. There’s a lot of people suffering from the same thing you are suffering right now. And as difficult as it might seem right now, I promise you, you will recover. And you need to change your approach to insomnia and try to disempower insomnia. I know how confusing it sounds, but I promise you will be fine and there’s a way out, and you will 100% recover. I’m 100% sure about that, because I was at the same point as you and maybe even worse, so there’s hope. Martin Reed: All right. Well, that’s great. Thanks again, Maria, for coming on. I really appreciate it. Maria Koziol: Yeah, no worries. Thank you so much, Martin, as well. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. Mentioned in this episode: The Tools by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Leah’s insomnia showed up around puberty and was a consistent presence throughout her teenage years. As an adult, Leah found that insomnia would often come and go in response to the stress and anxiety that comes with being a human being — until it showed up and stuck around for several weeks. What that happened, Leah found it harder to be the person she wanted to be and live the life she wanted to live. Sleeping pills no longer seemed to be the solution and she found herself really struggling. Like most people who struggle with chronic insomnia, Leah felt stuck. And that was because so many of the things she did to try to fix her sleep and deal with all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with insomnia just weren’t working. They weren’t getting her where she wanted to be. The more she tried, the more difficult it all became. So Leah decided to pursue a different approach. She moved away from trying to control sleep. She stopped chasing after sleep. She stopped putting pressure on herself to make sleep happen. She would remind herself that her body knew how to sleep and so it was pointless to put effort into sleep. Leah also worked on detaching herself from her thoughts — with ongoing practice she was able to become more of an observer of her thoughts and remain more present when they swept in and tried to push her around. Leah also realized that canceling plans and staying home after difficult nights didn’t make things any better. So, she committed to going about each day, independently of sleep — and she started to notice that even when she felt exhausted she could still do things that mattered and she could still focus on things other than sleep — even if only for a moment. Leah found that by committing to actions that kept her moving toward the life she wanted to live she was able to start freeing herself from all the mental chatter she was experiencing. Leah’s life is no longer controlled by how she sleeps or by the thoughts her mind generates. Sleep now feels more natural and all the energy that was once consumed by an ongoing struggle with insomnia is now being used to do more of the things that matter to her. Things that help Leah live the life she wants to live, independently of sleep. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay, so Leah, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Leah Werner: I’m excited to be here. It’s nice to be on the other side of it. Martin Reed: Yeah, you’re not the first person to say that. Someone finds the podcast and then one day they’re a guest themselves, and I think that’s the ultimate success story. Let’s get started talking about your experience and your story. Can you tell us about when your sleep problems first began and what you think may have caused those initial issues with sleep? Leah Werner: I first started having insomnia issues in puberty. I was probably 12 or 13 where I would toss and turn until the wee hours of the morning and be so upset and anxious that I would wake up my dad and he would walk me back to my bedroom. His mantra always was, “Even if you’re not sleeping, your body is resting.” That was his mantra. It was pretty much a consistent issue all through my teenage years and then kind of cycling in and out of it as an adult, definitely impacted by stress and anxiety and just kind of the goings-ons in life. It’s not an everyday thing, but it’s definitely been a struggle on and off since I was about 12. What I learned from you, Martin, is that some people are just predisposed to it. I don’t think it was any one given thing when I was 12 years old or 13, but when I learned that from working with you, it really helped, like, this is just kind of how I’m wired and I’ve got to kind of learn to live with it. Martin Reed: Yeah. What prompted you to start working with me or to decide, “I need to take action”? Because it sounds like you experienced lots of periods of insomnia throughout your whole life. Were you going through a particularly difficult patch? What was that motivation to try something different? Leah Werner: I was going through what I would call an acute patch in that it wasn’t just one or two nights, but weeks of insomnia and my functionality was severely diminished. I wasn’t able to think at work, my emotional threshold was incredibly low. I was really, really struggling. I was all-consumed every day with, “Am I going to sleep, am I going to sleep?” I knew that just popping sleeping pills, and I’ve tried a million different varieties, over the counter and prescribed, didn’t necessarily guarantee a night’s sleep and I knew I needed a different approach. That is when I found your podcast and then checked out your website. It was just several weeks of just pure misery. Martin Reed: Yeah. What was sleep like for you at that time? Was it just every night, just kind of different, just lousy? Or was it, “I’m always having difficulty falling asleep” or “I’m always having difficulty staying asleep, waking, finding it hard to fall back to sleep”? What was the difficulty? Leah Werner: The difficulty was it was taking me hours and hours and hours to fall asleep, if I fell asleep at all. Sometimes I experienced the waking up in the middle of the night insomnia after falling asleep pretty easily. But it doesn’t trigger the anxiety and kind of the train of negative thinking that just tossing and turning for five, six hours and then obsessively checking the clock, which I don’t do anymore, which is really helpful. That was that acute episode, just either getting one to two hours or no sleep for weeks on end. That’s what led me to you. Martin Reed: Yeah. Since you had such a long history with insomnia, lots of experience with it, I’m guessing that over the years, lots of different things that you tried. You already mentioned that you tried the medication route, sometimes helpful, sometimes not, maybe over the long term wasn’t proving to have the effect that you wanted. What other kind of things had you tried in a bid to kind of fix things and to put this insomnia behind you? Leah Werner: I tried praying about it, no lie, straight up, and I’m not the most spiritual or religious person, but I was desperate for help. I tried making myself as exhausted as possible with working out really hard, things of that nature. Mostly my go-to was sleeping drugs that, as I said, sometime worked. More often than not, it just made me super hungover the next day, which in and of itself on top of the fatigue and the side effects from just being exhausted and then being drugged over top of it and hungover, made life even worse. Martin Reed: Yeah. I remember when we were working together, one of the first changes you made was connected to the amount of time you were spending in bed, or just allotting for sleep each night. I’m curious to hear in your own words more about that change and what that experience was like for you. Leah Werner: Well, I thought you were crazy, Martin, because people who suffer from insomnia, all you want to do is go to bed and sleep. I believe it was 11:30, you told me to go to bed at 11:30 and wake up at 5:45 or 5:30, and I was like, “But that’s hardly any time in bed. This isn’t going to work. This isn’t going to work.” It was a pretty significant mental lift to get on board with you with that technique specifically. But I was so desperate because obviously my other attempts at trying to alleviate this chronic problem weren’t working. So I was like, “Okay.” So my whole family would go to bed, my wife would go to bed, my kids in bed, and there I am on the couch 10:00, 10:30, 11:00. By the time I did go to bed, my eyes were so heavy and that is when it really started to change things for me because I was tossing and turning a little bit, but it was not five, six hours of it. It was much more condensed, because I had built that sleep drive, to use your term, throughout the day and kind of pushing the limits of my exhaustion so that when I did go to bed it was much more fruitful. But I thought you were crazy. Martin Reed: You’re not the first person to tell me that. It does sound completely illogical, doesn’t it, when we really want more sleep to happen so we spend more time in bed and then we hear either from me or from somewhere else, “Well, how about we spend less time in bed?” It’s just the complete opposite of where we normally go. Like you said, all we are trying to do here is more closely match the amount of time we spend in bed to our current sleep situation, because we probably know, like you probably knew from your own experience, that the amount of time you were spending in bed up to that point wasn’t usually generating more sleep, only leading to more nighttime wakefulness. So what we’re doing is we’re just reducing all that opportunity for long periods of nighttime wakefulness. We’re helping to build that natural sleep drive because you’re out of bed for longer. We’re also preventing you from chasing after sleep, putting more effort into sleep, because now you’ve got this earliest possible bedtime, so you’re not going to be going to bed earlier to chase after sleep. You’ve got a kind of consistent morning out of bed time, so you’re not going to be… Well, you still might, but you’ve got this plan in place to not then chase after sleep in the morning too by sleeping in. It’s like all these different parts of a jigsaw can kind of just fall into place just through that behavior change, that new habit of just allotting less time for sleep, which for most people is going to bed later or maybe getting out of bed earlier in the morning. Leah Werner: It really does feel like a jigsaw because that wasn’t the only piece of it when the instruction to get out of bed if you’re tossing and turning also really, really helped because it mitigates the frustration that starts to build in your head. Instead of just being continually frustrated and that heightened arousal getting more and more exacerbated, you’re like, “Oh, I’m feeling that frustration. That means I need to get out of bed.” And I would get out of bed, and at first it was a little bit of a leap, like, “I don’t want to get out of bed.” But I would go downstairs, the house was to myself. I would only read, I wouldn’t watch TV. I didn’t want any more stimuli coming at me. When I started to feel my eyes getting heavy, I would go back upstairs. Sometimes I did that five times a night, but I was so desperate to overcome this or have new tools to work with it that I committed myself to it. That was the other piece of the jigsaw, to use your expression, that really started to change things for me. Martin Reed: Yeah. Do you remember how much time you used to spend in bed or allot for sleep before you kind of changed tact there and got closer to six, six and a half hours? Do you remember what it was before that? Leah Werner: It was 9:30 to like 7:00, which is crazy. I mean, that’s crazy. It’s funny, since working with you, I naturally go to bed later now by an hour, hour and a half, so that’s an interesting outcome that I wasn’t expecting. But way too long in bed, especially when it only is exacerbating my anxiety and kind of the train, the compulsive thinking about how, “This isn’t working, this isn’t working.” That was truly very helpful. Martin Reed: Yeah, so that was a very big change for you to make, and like you just touched upon, you thought I was crazy. Your mind’s generating all these thoughts and feelings like, “This makes no sense. How’s this ever going to work? This is going to be a disaster.” But you did it anyway and I’m curious how. How were you able to just commit to making that change when probably almost every sinew in your body was like, “This makes no sense. How is this going to work? I’m going to be depriving myself of all these hours, opportunity for sleep.” How did you go about just making that change regardless? Leah Werner: I think what helped me is listening to your podcast and listening to other people’s experience with implementing these same techniques and how fruitful they were, reading the testimonials of people that have worked with you on your website. It gave me the inspiration and helped me dig in. Once again, I was really looking for answers that were sustainable that I could take with me anywhere I go. That was not about sleep medication because it consistently disappointed. It just kind of doesn’t work. The support group helped as well, just providing that inspiration that really was like, “I’m going to work this to the fullest extent possible,” because I really wanted some sustainable answers. Martin Reed: Another technique that you touched upon earlier was that process of getting out of bed. So, I think there’s a few different ways people can implement them. Some people find it helpful one way, other people another way. Some people like to kind of estimate chunks of time, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, and then use that as a cue to just get out of bed and do something else. For other people it’s just like, “It’s okay for me to be awake in bed for as long as that feels comfortable. As soon as it starts to feel really unpleasant, I’m just going to do something more appealing instead, because I can’t control sleep, can’t control how I think or how I feel, but I can control what I do. If being in bed doesn’t feel good, I’m tossing and turning, struggling, I’ll just do something that makes that time that I’m already spending awake anyway more pleasant.” It sounds like that was something that you found helpful. Did you find it helpful right at the start? A lot of people tend to find it’s a bit of a drag at first… Leah Werner: Oh, it’s a drag. Martin Reed: … they have to get through that mental process of, again, “How am I going to sleep if I get out of bed or do something active during the night?” But that’s not our goal. Our goal is just to make that wakefulness more pleasant so that we are not fighting, trying to make sleep happen. I’m just curious to hear a bit more about your experience with that and when maybe you felt that it was proving to be helpful. Leah Werner: Yeah, it was hard, because your body is telling you to lay there, but what I learned is that the longer I toss and turn, the higher my anxiety goes, the higher my obsession with falling asleep goes, knowing full well that when I get to that super-duper heightened sense of super arousal, that there’s no way on God’s green earth I’m going to fall asleep. So being able to reflect on the connection between excessive tossing and turning, making my mental and emotional state worse is actually working against me in terms of my ability to naturally fall asleep, recognizing that this is something I can’t control and my body is meant to fall asleep. Making those connections really helped me start to piece together how what I was doing was actually working against me, and that only reinforced my commitment to getting out of bed. And I was covering up every single clock in the house, which in and of itself is an amazing technique. You don’t need to know what time it is, you don’t need to know what time it is, it doesn’t matter, and I’m truly on board with that now. But getting up and doing something a little bit more pleasurable, as you say, is so helpful because it starts to decrease the mental chatter, it starts to decrease the anxiety. Yeah, you might not want to be sitting on your couch at 3:00 in the morning, but you definitely do not want to be tossing and turning in bed obsessing about sleeping either. Martin Reed: Yeah, and I think that’s the comparison, right? It’s like we don’t want to be on the couch at night, but we don’t want to be tossing and turning either, so we kind of just choose the better option, so “What’s most appealing to me at the current time? I’m lying in bed, tossing and turning. I’ve got a choice. I can stay here tossing and turning, hope the sleep comes, doesn’t sound pleasant. Or I can get out of bed and do something else instead.” That probably doesn’t sound pleasant either, but maybe that’s a little bit more of an appealing option. If it’s not more appealing to do something else, then by all means just stay in bed, right? We’re just looking to give ourselves the opportunity to make that wakefulness more pleasant. That’s really all it comes down to, because that’s the only thing we can control. Leah Werner: Now if I start tossing and turning and I… There’s always like a moment where the anxiety and the starting to think about sleep clicks in. I know that is the exact moment I need to get out of bed, the exact moment. Because you can flip-flop for an hour and be like, “Yeah, okay, it’s taking longer to fall asleep tonight.” Most times that’s kind of the attitude that I have now. I’m kind of at peace with nighttime wakefulness, but the second I sense my anxiety’s starting to rise and the mental chatter of “I’m never going to fall asleep” starts to come across my mind’s eye, I’m like, “Oh, it’s time to get out of bed, time to get out of bed.” Because I know it’s such a powerful tool, it’s no longer a leap to commit to that when that does happen, which is very infrequently now. Martin Reed: You talked about covering up the clocks and just not checking the time at night. You said that was quite empowering. Was that something that you did before we started to work together or was that a change that you made once we were working together? Leah Werner: Well, sometimes I would turn the clock around, but then I swear to God, at 3:00 in the morning I’d be like, “What time is it?” And I’d turn it right back, so it was a little bit hit or miss, but I wouldn’t cover up all, like the microwave clock, the clock on the stove, the clock in the living room. Me and my wife every night while I was working with you and after would cover up every single clock in the house, so that when I would come downstairs after tossing and turning and noting the anxiety and mental chatter rising, when I would walk through the house, there was no reference to what time it was. That alone frees up so much negative mental chatter because there’s kind of no context. It’s dark outside, the house is quiet. There’s kind of no sense about what time it is leading up to when the birds start chirping. I don’t do that anymore, but I was all hands on deck with that. “I do not want to know what time it is anywhere in this house,” and stay committed to that for a long time. Martin Reed: Did you find that was an easy change to make? I ask that because I’ve had clients who say, “I just cannot make that change. I just can’t imagine what it would be like not to know the time during the night.” For lots of people, it can be a really hard change and they feel like it’s going to lead to more mental chatter, “Because now my brain’s going to be like, ‘but what time is it?’ Now my brain’s just going to be fixated on wondering what the time is.” I’m just curious if that was something you experienced or you were just like, “No, I’m not going to- Leah Werner: It was liberating. The hardest thing was the going to bed later and the getting out of bed, but I just committed to it, and then we adapt easily, I think, after a while, humans do. So then I was like, “Oh, this is what I do.” But covering up the clocks was liberating. I did not struggle with that at all. Martin Reed: Well, you really went all in there looking for every single clock and just covering it all up. Leah Werner: Oh, I wasn’t playing, Martin. I wasn’t playing. Martin Reed: You weren’t. People listening to this, some people might think, “Yeah, I can get behind that. I’m going to go and every night now I’m going to cover everything up.” Other people might be like, “No, that sounds like too much.” I don’t think it matters. I think it comes down to the intent. If we’re actively seeking out the time at night, that might not be a helpful behavior because it just leads to what I call those mental gymnastics. Now your brain is thinking, “All right, how much sleep have I got?” Or “How long have I been awake? How much time do I have left before my alarm goes off?” All that stuff. All because we’ve checked the time. That’s the usual outcome in my experience of checking the time during the night. The best outcome is probably neutral, just has no effect on us. Leah Werner: Right. There’s no positive outcome. Martin Reed: Yeah, I’m inclined to agree. I just think that’s just one of these small changes we can make, that for some people can sound a bit scary, but can be worth experimenting with just not checking the time, not seeking out the time. You don’t have to necessarily block every single source of the time out. If you think that’s helpful, go for it. If not, if that sounds like a bit too much work, it’s just intent. It’s just that seeking out the time, let’s not seek out the time. Maybe let’s just put our alarm clock or our phone on the other side of the room so we’re not tempted to reach out for it. If we get out of bed during the night, let’s not walk past with laser vision past the microwave. Leah Werner: It’s so true. It’s so true. Martin Reed: Or all the other stuff that has the time on. It can be really helpful, a really helpful change. Leah Werner: I think the other thing I learned is that the nights that you’re getting four hours of sleep or three or two or 30 minutes, I had nights that, or zero, then weighing in on how you’re feeling the next day, you really start to see the impacts of what we say is awful, categorically awful when you have insomnia. How I felt after four hours of sleep versus having no sleep are vastly different. Because of that, because now I have that awareness about how I feel emotionally and physically and how I can think at my job and perform on what people would categorically say is an awful night’s sleep, having an appreciation of the nuance of what nighttime wakefulness is and how much sleep you’re getting is, I think really helps you detach from the need to know the time. Because if you have five hours left to sleep, I feel pretty good after a five-hour night of sleep now. You know what I mean? I think it helped me detach from the desire to know the time because I have a greater appreciation for the impacts of sleep on me or the impacts of wakefulness at night on me and appreciate how I really do feel okay somewhat and can function and experience joy and live my values, as you say, on what people would deem is not enough sleep, so it helped disconnect the desire to know the time. Martin Reed: Yeah, and that’s a great point because a clock doesn’t know when we’re sleepy. A clock doesn’t know when we’ve had enough sleep. A clock doesn’t know anything. All the clock knows is the time. The fact of the matter is we can’t really do anything in the middle of the night with that additional information. “Oh, it’s 2:00 AM.” What can we do with that? There’s nothing we can do with that. So why put ourselves through that? We’re kind of just setting ourselves up for more of the gymnastics, more of the difficult thoughts and the feelings, more of the sleep efforts. Perhaps if we just eliminate that as one piece of the jigsaw of insomnia, frees us up to maybe just do something more pleasant instead at night, rather than just watching that clock ticking endlessly all night long. Leah Werner: I strongly encourage that technique alone. It was really, really helpful. Martin Reed: Something else that I remember we were discussing when we were working together that’s related to that sleep drive, the idea that the longer we spend awake, the more we build sleep drive, and therefore the more likely sleep is going to happen, was the daytime naps. It’s something that a lot of people with insomnia struggle with. We either nap, get some sleep during the day, but then set ourselves up for some sleep disruption at night because of that lowered sleep drive, or we try and nap during the day, then maybe fine, we can’t nap, and then leads to more worry about our ability to sleep. I remember that you were taking some daytime naps. Leah Werner: All the time. Martin Reed: I think you were quite successful at those daytime naps as well. But that was something that you- Leah Werner: I was. I would pass out cold. Martin Reed: Yeah, but that was something that you wanted to move away from. I’m just curious to hear about your experience with that and the process of moving away from maybe a reliance or having the naps as a set part of your daily routine. Leah Werner: That was hard to give up because I’m a great napper, which is ironic, right? It’s still sleep, but because it’s happening in the middle of the day, it’s easier, that makes no sense. That was hard to give up. I did carve out times just to be still, do some meditation, maybe do some stretching, something that was kind of disconnected from my day-to-day to have a built-in reprieve during the time that I would traditionally nap. But I will tell you that those days when I was getting no sleep the night before, I was like, “I just want a nap.” And I would hear your accent in my head, “Don’t do it. Don’t do the nap.” I think I cheated a couple days, I’m not going to lie, but overall, you really do start to see that connection with how you are during the day and its connection to building the sleep drive. The advice to commit to your day, no matter what, the getting up and working out, the cooking for my family, these values that I hold dear really are connected to building my sleep drive and not napping, being connected to building my sleep drive. When I started to make those connections, it gave me kind of the commitment and the chutzpah to be like, “There’s nothing I want to do right now but sleep, but I would rather sleep tonight, so I’m going to commit to my day. I’m not going to nap.” All of that, all of those techniques start to decrease the mental chatter, which is the thing that actually exacerbates insomnia. You’re predisposed, that’s fine, but it’s the mental chatter that makes it so much more, so much bigger than it actually is. Martin Reed: One area where I can, in my own experience, just seeing when naps can become problematic is when we kind of use that time that we might otherwise use to do stuff that’s really important to us, like the values that you just mentioned. Regardless of whether those naps are successful or not, we might kind of block out that hour in our day that we might be able to spend doing things that are really important to us that move us towards the kind of life we want to live. But because we are so kind of desperate maybe to catch up on sleep or to chase after sleep, we kind of substitute that time to lie down, either try and sleep or to sleep. Sometimes that can end up moving us away from the kind of life you want to live, which doesn’t usually have a good outcome over the longer term. Leah Werner: Definitely, definitely. If you’re not successful at napping, then the negative train starts in your head, “Well, if I’m not going to be able to nap at 2:00, I’m definitely not going to be asleep at 10:00.” Then you start the obsession about sleep and by the time 10:00 rolls around, you’re so filled with anxiety how you’re never going to… I would literally think I’m never going to sleep again, which now looking back seems absurd, but when I was in the thick of it, it feels like gospel truth. It can totally backfire. The napping and not being able to sleep while you’re napping can totally backfire and make the nighttime desire to sleep all the more difficult to attain. Martin Reed: And I’m keen to talk about all those thoughts and those feelings and all the emotions that come with insomnia because they can be a really big, maybe even the number one source of struggle. Like every human being, you yourself, you found that your mind, just as you touched upon, it would wander away from the present, just like it loves to do. It either looks back on previous nights or previous days, thinks about what the next night might be like or what the next day might be like. Of course this can make the days more difficult because we’ve got a mind that just seems like it just doesn’t want to focus, it wants to worry, it wants to ruminate. The same thing for night times as well, it wants to worry and ruminate and that doesn’t feel good. So we end up putting pressure on ourselves to sleep so they go away or we put pressure on ourselves to try and fight, to try and get rid of all those difficult thoughts and feelings, and all of these things tend to make sleep more difficult, tend to make those thoughts, feelings, and emotions more powerful. I’m curious to hear how you changed your relationship with your mind, how you managed to bring it back when it would wander away, and how you changed your relationship with all the difficult thoughts and those feelings that come with insomnia. Leah Werner: That has been the biggest hurdle to overcome. All those tools and tricks and techniques you taught me were so helpful. But the thing that has really spoken to my long term success is that, and I swear, and this sounds so trite almost, your mantra that your body knows how to sleep totally started switching it up for me. Firstly, I never thought of it in that way, ever. When I would talk to my doctor about my insomnia and be struggling and she’s just tossing medication at me, those words were never spoken, nothing like that was ever said to me. It seems so intuitive now, but it really blew my mind, so I literally used it as my mantra. “Your body knows how to sleep, your body knows how to sleep, your body’s meant to sleep, your body knows how to sleep.” So I would start, when I would have the thought pop up into my mind’s eye, “You’re never going to sleep again,” which was consistent, and I’ve heard other people voices on your podcast, I immediately went to the thought, “My body knows how to sleep,” to the point now, and it was a discipline to conjure it up. It’s a mantra, you have to be intentional about it. But now, like last night I had kind of a, eh, night sleeping. It took me a while to fall asleep and I started to have some negative thoughts and immediately I had the “your body knows how to sleep” and I’m like, “Oh, right, right.” It immediately brought me into the moment. You gave me some other kind of mindfulness techniques about how to drop into your physical body, so you’re kind of shutting off your mind. You’re like, “Let me feel my toes and my ankles and move all the way up and kind of check in with how my body is feeling and kind of move through that kind of meditation, if you will.” Those two things really helped me get out of my head. Now that the mantra is so ingrained in me that, it’s almost like I have created a new channel in my brain that now my thoughts are, “Of course my body knows how to sleep. I know how to sleep. I’m going to fall asleep naturally,” has really helped make the radio of insomnia dissipate quite dramatically. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think, now, correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on this, why you feel that just reminding yourself that “my body knows how to sleep” seems to be helpful. Do you think it’s maybe because it helps you just remember or identify the fact that you don’t have to put effort into sleep because after all, your body knows. You’re reminding yourself that your body knows how to sleep, therefore, “I don’t need to be involved in the process, I can kind of exactly untangle myself from all that effort.” Leah Werner: Insomniacs, myself included, we put a ton of effort into falling asleep, right? You’re like, “Okay, I’m not going to do blue screens. I’m going to make sure there’s no light in my room. I’m going to go to bed early. I’m going to cover myself in lavender oil,” whatever it is. There’s so much effort into controlling sleep, and I too was trying to control sleep. But that preoccupation with trying to control sleep makes sleep more elusive, so you’re actually working against yourself. So that mantra, “Your body knows how to sleep,” really flip that on its head, that it kind of took the pressure off. Yes, you still want to sleep. I still feel that way and I feel for everybody listening to this podcast, you do. You just want to sleep. You don’t want to be awake. You need it, you need it for so many different reasons, but taking that pressure off, that helped relieve that chatter. There’s absolutely nothing I can do, aside from don’t drink a giant thing of coffee at nine o’clock at night. I mean, there are things you could do that will promote sleep or detract from sleep. But the sense of “I’m able to control this natural processee,” that mantra helped me release that belief and that belief, I didn’t know it was deeply entrenched in me that I kind of am responsible for this, so to speak. It helped me take that pressure off my mind and my emotional health, like, this is not something I can control. Martin Reed: Sleep doesn’t do well being micromanaged, just as us ourselves as human beings don’t respond well to micromanagement, right? Leah Werner: Amen, brother. Amen. Martin Reed: I remember one of my first jobs when I was a teenager, it was working at a travel agency and I would have to pack up all their brochures, all the holiday brochures advertising the resorts. But after they got printed, there was always new inserts that had to go on, new properties that had to go in, certain things that had to be photocopied. They had to be packaged all in a certain way. So I’d do my training. They’d say, “Okay, this is how you do it.” Seem pretty straightforward to me. Just leave me to go about it and I’ll just get it done. But it was like there was always someone over my shoulder, “Oh no, that wasn’t quite straight enough. That was the wrong… There’s a fold in that paper there. You can’t do that.” This person was putting all these rules and regulations. I struggled to even get five of those brochures in a box by the end of the day. Whereas if they’d have just left me to it, I probably could have got 500 in that box. I think sleep’s the same way, when we’re trying to micromanage it. “You need to be falling asleep now” or “You can’t be waking up now, you can’t be thinking this, you can’t be doing that. That wasn’t a good sleep. Oh, this was a good sleep. Do that again.” When we try and micromanage sleep, what happens? It’s like me as a 16-year-old, I’m just getting overwhelmed in that travel agency and I’m not getting anything done. I think that’s what it comes down to with sleep. Leah Werner: Yeah, so true, so true. I’m so grateful for that mantra, and you probably wouldn’t even called it that, but I’m so grateful because that was one of the critical pieces of the puzzle that helped me kind of overcome the mental hurdle of insomnia, and that’s really what it’s about. It’s the mental hurdle of it. Martin Reed: Yes, I totally agree. I think that the biggest part of that hurdle is our struggle with it because the wakefulness doesn’t feel good, because the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions that come with it don’t feel good. As human beings, we don’t want stuff that doesn’t feel good near us, so we try and get rid of it. We try and fight with it. We try and avoid it, and that’s the struggle. That is the entire struggle. It’s our human desire to get rid of all the difficulty in our life. But unfortunately, we just cannot control sleep. We cannot control what we think. We cannot control how we feel. We cannot control our emotions. Probably can temporarily, read a joke book, we might laugh for a few minutes, but we’re talking about the long term. If a thought keeps popping up in our head, the more we try and get rid of that thought, the more it’s just going to keep popping back. The more we try and feel happy and get rid of anxiety and worry, the more that worry and that anxiety is going to kind of push back and get more powerful and have more influence over our lives. It’s really about trying to recognize what we can control, what we can’t control, and just relieving ourselves, just withdrawing from that battle, that ongoing, endless exhausting struggle with all the stuff we can’t control, and just accepting that we can’t control that stuff. Not trying to kid ourselves. It sucks, we don’t want it to be here. Leah Werner: Oh yeah, it still sucks. Martin Reed: Yeah, but we know from experience that we can’t push it away and all that energy, if we just remove ourselves from that struggle, we get so tangled up in it, we free up all that energy to do something else. Even in the presence of all that struggle and all that pain, we might do something, for example, during the night, more pleasant. We might have a little bit more energy during the day to do stuff that matter to us because we’ve got more energy in reserve because we haven’t been engaged in a horse fighting duel all night with that thought and that worry and that anxiety. It’s still there, but now we’ve got more energy to do what matters, and so all that difficult stuff then has less influence over us. Leah Werner: Yeah. It’s interesting, committing to your day, regardless of how much sleep you got in and of itself is a really powerful technique. Because when I would cancel plans, I would take a nap, I would get depressed because I canceled plans and I wasn’t seeing my friends. Then my daytime focus was all about accommodating exhaustion, so then it would just reinforce the mental chatter throughout the day. My nighttime was about mental chatter around insomnia, anxiety around insomnia, and then canceling my day as much as I was allowed to cancel would do the exact same thing. Committing to your plans is a way to start freeing yourself from that mental chatter, because when you’re in the moment doing what you need to do about your day, the fun stuff, the professional stuff, the family stuff, I found myself… I went to a happy hour with one of my favorite coworkers, and I had hardly gotten any sleep in days. This is when I was actively working with you. I remember there was a moment that I realized while I was talking to her that I forgot I was exhausted. I totally forgot. I forgot I was exhausted, I forgot I hadn’t slept in four days. And I was driving home that, and I was like, “That’s why Martin advises you to commit to your day because it gives you a reprieve from the mental chatter of insomnia.” That is so connected to me, to overcoming the compulsive thinking and the heightened state of arousal both day and night, if you just are like, “I can work out when I’m tired, I can do my job when I’m tired,” and not feeding the beast by accommodating all of what I need to do around the fact that I’m not sleeping. Martin Reed: Yeah, and it makes such a difference when we’re engaged in something, even when we don’t feel good, when there’s all this difficult stuff going on in our mind. And that’s where I think it can just be so helpful to just make that commitment, which I think it does take, and the effort that it can take to just commit to doing things. They don’t always have to be these huge milestones, but just doing things that are important to us during the day, no matter how big, no matter how small they are, and just giving ourselves that opportunity to just keep moving toward the life we want to live and give ourselves those opportunities to feel engaged, to feel enriched, to feel like we’re living the kind of life we want to live. Leah Werner: Exactly. Exactly. It’s so fascinating because it really is a multifaceted approach. I don’t think just using one of these techniques would have been the answer for me, but the combination of sleep restriction, my new favorite mantra, committing to my day, covering up the clocks, which I don’t do anymore, it was kind of like the perfect combo to really kind of change my brain and its interpretation of what it means to not sleep, which at the end of the day helped me sleep more. It’s so fascinating. Martin Reed: It really is. Yeah, I completely agree. Well, one thing you touched upon was something that you did during the nights when the mind was just kind of kicking off was to try and come back into your body. I’m curious to just hear a little bit more about that process, because I just know that people listening to this are going to be curious as soon as you said that. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that, how it works, what the goal is, what the purpose is? Leah Werner: Well, it’s a mindfulness meditation. I first learned about it years ago reading some Buddhist works by Pema Chödrön, and it really is, you’re laying there in bed and you’re totally attached to your thoughts. Those thoughts are not good. They’re not helping you relax, most definitely. They’re only contributing to that heightened state of arousal, which of course is counter to your ability to fall asleep. You have to get out of your head because it’s what’s going on in your head that’s actually keeping you awake. So getting out of your head is the body scan, which is you can start at the top of your head or your toes, and you literally are like, “I feel my toes” or “I’m checking in with my toes” or “how do my toes feel” and then “how do my arches feel,” “how do my heels feel” and you don’t broad stroke it. You move up your body meticulously, “My calves, the back of my knees, my thighs, my hips.” You go through all the pieces and parts, getting up to the top of your head, and it should take some time, if you really break down every kind of piece and part of your body, just checking in. “How do I feel? How do I feel?” Because of course the back of your heels likely feel just fine, right? It’s the head that is causing you the angst. It provides you the space between what you’re compulsively thinking about and what’s actually going on in your body, so that’s one technique. There’s some other techniques that I have found helpful where you picture your thoughts as clouds and your peace and equanimity is a blank blue sky. When you have a cloud, pass your mind’s eye, a thought past your mind’s eye, that, “I’m never going to sleep tonight.” You just like, “Oh, that’s a fear cloud.” And you start to disassociate who you really are from the thoughts that you generate, and I found the body scan and kind of the cloud blue sky metaphor meditation to be really helpful to help me start to disassociate this compulsive thinking from what was actually happening in the moment. What was actually happening in the moment is “I, Leah, am laying in bed, my body is laying in bed, my head is on a pillow.” All the stuff going on in my head is not reality. It is not what’s really going on, it’s just compulsive thinking, and there’s a million other types out there. But it starts to create that separation between compulsive thinking and what the moment is actually presenting. That exercise and that awareness can be truly beneficial to all aspects of your life. This is the only moment we have. There’s no future, there’s no past. There’s no predicting my night’s sleep tonight based on two weeks of bad sleep. It’s like this is the only moment. Some of those mindfulness techniques I found very, very helpful. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think it’s important to recognize too, just from your description there, that your goal is never to control what your mind is doing, not to get rid of a thought or a feeling or an emotion. It’s just to bring you present and to recognize thoughts for what they are. We’re kind of the container of our thoughts. We’re not the thoughts themselves. So when you’re doing that muscle relaxation, there’s all this stuff going on in your mind, but at the same time, there’s still a body here that you have full control over and that you can bring your attention back to. At the same time, there’s all these thoughts that are being generated by the mind. We can’t control them, just like we can’t control a cloud. A cloud might come along, it might sit overhead for a while. It might be a really dark, scary cloud. Eventually it’ll move on. It might reform, might come back. But it’s not about controlling our thoughts, it’s just about changing our relationship with them. It’s not about trying to control sleep, “Okay, I’m going to do this muscle relaxation tonight to make me fall back to sleep. I didn’t fall back to sleep. It didn’t work.” We can kind of get a bit tripped up there. Really, our goal is to just change our relationship with what’s going on inside our mind. I think that’s really what it comes down to. It does take practice because I think it’s a skill. We’re hardwired to want to push all that stuff away. I think it takes a lot of practice repeatedly for us to get to a place where we are able to become more of an observer of all that difficult stuff. Leah Werner: You don’t attach yourself to the thought, it’s just a thought. It’s about that detachment. It’s not who you are. That is a revolutionary shift, if you can get there. It is a practice. I mean, every day I practice, it’s not just around sleep, but in other parts of my life that thoughts are fleeting and they are not actually who you are. You just let the cloud pass your blue sky, just let it pass, name it what it is, fear, joy, whatever, and then release it. That has been really helpful with insomnia. Martin Reed: That’s great. I think that’s really powerful stuff there, for sure. I’m curious now, Leah, what’s an average night for you these days, if there is such a thing? Leah Werner: For the most part, I’ve been sleeping really well. I still wake up really early. When those birds start chirping, I’m awake, so like 5:30. I don’t necessarily get out of bed. I go to bed after 10:00 now. I wake up a few times a night and typically fall right back to sleep. But then nights last night, I tossed and turned for a while. I didn’t have that moment of “Ah,” which would’ve triggered me getting out of bed. I was just kind of like, “Oh, I’m not sleeping.” I didn’t make it mean that I wasn’t going to fall asleep. I didn’t make it mean that I wasn’t going to fall asleep tonight. I just was like, “This what’s going on right now.” And I didn’t attach anything to it. But for the most part I feel like I kind of made it through, for sure, through the darkest part, which led me to you. Then on nights like last night, they’re somewhat infrequent where I don’t feel like I got enough sleep. I feel tired and kind of dragging today, but I can still function. I still committed to my day. On average, my sleep has significantly improved since working with you. Martin Reed: What about the kind of medication cabinet, the pharmaceutical cocktail, list? How are we doing with that? Leah Werner: Oh my God, I tried everything. I was taking a daily prescription that I weaned myself off of. When you really think about it, I’m sure people who listen to this podcast can say “amen” to this, that it’s not a guarantee of sleep. It is not. The techniques I learned in working with you have been far more successful in helping me sleep than all of the medication I have taken in my entire life combined. Martin Reed: Wow, that’s amazing. What about your days? Because I think it’s easy to, at least people that don’t ever have any experience with insomnia, to think that insomnia is a nighttime problem, a challenge that only exists at night, but it really does make the days difficult too. I’m curious to hear how your days are different now as well. Leah Werner: I don’t think about sleep. I don’t think about sleep, and I used to think about sleep all the time. I would either change my day to accommodate fatigue. I would obsess about it. “Am I going to sleep tonight?” Use the past to predict the future. It was a constant chatter in the back of my mind, and now I don’t think about it at all, which is, unto itself, is I can’t even believe I’m vocalizing this to you. I don’t think about it at all. I start to think about it like at 9:30. I’m like, “Oh, go put on my PJ’s and brush my teeth and wash my face.” Just those normal protocols before you go to bed. But I don’t think about it. That in and of itself just sets you up for better sleep because you’re not using all this energy causing all this anxiety and hyperarousal and obsession that will only make sleeping that night more difficult. So I’m free from that, I’m free from kind the daylight obsession about “Am I going to sleep tonight?” Tonight will unfold as tonight will unfold, so I’m definitely free from that. Martin Reed: I’m curious to hear, because you had such a long history with insomnia, once you started to make the changes that we’ve been talking about in this episode, how long that process took do you feel like from getting started making new changes, exploring your relationship with your thoughts, implementing new behaviors around sleep. How long was that process from “insomnia is still this major issue in my life” to getting to that point where you feel like it’s more in the rear-view mirror, it’s more behind you, it’s far less influential over your life now? Leah Werner: I’d say about three to four months. I mean, I started seeing improvements within that second week of doing sleep restriction, covering up the clocks, et cetera. But really feeling like kind of free from the shackles of it, so to speak, was about three to four months. Martin Reed: I’ve just started to recently ask this because I think sometimes when we’re only talking for about an hour, and it can become easy for people to listen and think, “Okay, if I just do this, this and this, within a couple of weeks, things will feel great again.” Or “That’s the kind of story I’m being told or sold on here.” But that’s definitely not the case. What it is is about learning new techniques, right? Learning new skills, new ways of developing our relationship with what goes on in our mind, and it does take time. Leah Werner: It does take time, and it does take commitment, and I think it takes commitment to all of the puzzle pieces. It’s not going to be one singular thing necessarily that really helps people. It’s committing to all of it. It’s committing to all of it. I think because I was so committed to all of it is why in hindsight it seemed like it didn’t take that long. Three to four months really isn’t that long of a period of time, especially when I think about my whole history of struggling with insomnia since I was 12, and I’m 46 now. Three months is nothing. But it definitely does not happen overnight. It does require that commitment to… Just try all the techniques, just go all in. There’s nothing to lose. If you’re already not sleeping, there’s nothing to lose in trying all the techniques, even if you’re fearful of trying them, even if you think they’re going to be a giant pain or they’re not going to be helpful, once again, that’s just a thought. We’re just letting it pass our mind’s eye. We’re not attaching doubt to it. We’re not going to attach our fear. We’re not going to do any of that. I think that’s really what it takes for these techniques to be successful for you. It’s tough. It’s tough, it’s hard being exhausted all the time. It really is hard, so I have a lot of empathy for people who are still in active struggle with it. Martin Reed: It is important to recognize that, that it is hard and that it is a struggle and that it is difficult. It’s so easy listening to these success stories, these transformations to think, “Oh, this sounds so easy.” But it’s not. We’re just talking about specific techniques, which are easy to talk about, but the implementation is usually far from easy and it can be difficult, and it takes a lot of practice and it takes time and commitment and effort. It is a process. Leah Werner: But you’ve seen this time and time again, Martin, that it works. It does work. I mean, how many people have you interviewed on this podcast? How many people go through your program, your free two-week online course? I mean, the proof is out there that it works, so yeah, commitment and patience, it does take some time for you to kind of get through the forest to the promised land. Martin Reed: Definitely. All right. Well, Leah, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and just share all this fantastic information. You’ve shared some really good insights I just know people are going to get a lot of value from, whether that’s motivation, hope, encouragement, empathy, all that good stuff that you’ve shared with us. But there is one question missing, which I ask every single guest, so I don’t want you to be the odd one out. So I’m going to ask you one more question, and it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help and they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Leah Werner: I would advise them to work with you, whether it be the one-on-one that I did with you after the two-week online free course. I think the truth of the matter is, as someone who’s struggled with this for so long, the techniques that you presented to me, no one has ever presented to me. I think there are techniques out there that have not been tried that really can benefit you. I think you have seen that people have been very successful using these techniques. I know when you interact with your primary care doctor and you’re getting your scripts of drugs, there’s no conversation that I have had like I’ve had with you about sleep, and that was such a welcome reprieve from modern medicine not knowing what to do with insomniacs. I know it can feel like you’ve tried everything. I probably would’ve said that before I talked to you, but I don’t think that’s probably true. I think there are some techniques that might be new to people to try that I learned from working with you that really have been the secret to my success. Without finding you, I don’t think I would’ve ever learned about these techniques that make sense to me now and seem kind of intuitive now, but most definitely, that wasn’t the case a year ago. So being open to the fact that while it might feel like you’ve tried everything and it had been unsuccessful, that there are actually new ways of thinking about this and working this issue that could give you some reprieve and to have some success. I feel like there are answers out there to help people get through these waters, because it is really tough. Martin Reed: Well, that’s great. I really appreciate that and I appreciate your time coming on and sharing all your wisdom and your experience, so thank you again, Leah. Leah Werner: It was great to see you and chat with you, Martin. Take care. Martin Reed: Absolutely. You too. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Amanda slept well through high school, college, and her early professional life. Her experience with insomnia began when a number of different stressors all showed up around the same time. She had a baby. She relocated. She had to get a new job. She had to deal with a toxic parent. Even when things settled down, Amanda found herself struggling to fall asleep. She felt as though her own mind was working against her. She started to panic and didn’t know what to do. After finding that CBD gummies, melatonin, over-the-counter sleep aids, alcohol, and the many sleep rituals and rules she implemented were not helping, Amanda realized she needed to explore a different approach. That was when she found the Insomnia Coach podcast, recognized her own experience in the stories of others, and started working with me. Amanda realized that the more she chased after sleep, the more she craved it, the more she tried to make it happen, the more difficult it became. So, she started to move away from chasing after sleep and from trying to fight or avoid nighttime wakefulness and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that came with it. She started to acknowledge her thoughts — even the really difficult ones — instead of trying to control them. As she did that, she found that her thoughts weren’t always true and that she always had control over her actions, regardless of what her mind might have told her. As she practiced this new approach, Amanda started to notice more of the good stuff that was present in her life and she started to do more of the things that mattered to her. And, as she moved away from the insomnia struggle and expanded the focus of her attention, she found that she started to sleep a lot better, too. As Amanda shares in this episode, the process was not easy. There were ups and downs. Her new approach took time and ongoing practice. However, as she started to get more comfortable with experiencing nighttime wakefulness, as she gained skill in allowing her thoughts and feelings to come and go as they pleased, and as she committed to doing things that kept her moving toward the life she wanted to live each day — independently of sleep — she was able to reclaim her life from insomnia. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay. So Amanda, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast. Amanda Kramer: I’m so happy to be here. Martin Reed: I’m really excited for everything that we are going to cover. Let’s just start right at the beginning. Can you tell us when your sleep problems first began, and if you can remember or if it was obvious what you think caused those initial issues with sleep? Amanda Kramer: Sure. I actually did have a little bit of insomnia when I was a child, but had gotten over that very quickly and became a really good sleeper. I was a great sleeper through high school, through college, through my whole early professional life in New York as a performer. I didn’t have to even think about it. I just looked forward to sleeping. And then my daughter was born, and I was dealing with all the new natural stressors of becoming a parent and not sleeping well. And on top of that, we had just moved up to the Bay Area. So we were dealing with the housing market, and new jobs, and new bosses. And so there was a lot happening at once. A lot of stress happening at one time. And that probably would’ve been enough to set me off. But there was one extra layer of stress, which was having to deal with a very toxic parent. So my stress was just through the roof, and I was dealing with these very deep feelings throughout the day, throughout the night. And once my daughter settled in and started sleeping again, my husband started sleeping again just fine. And I was awake. I was up in the night and unable to sleep. So everyone else was settled in, and I just found myself unable to fall asleep. And I didn’t have the tools that I have today. So I didn’t know what to do with myself. I just sort of panicked and unsure of what was happening. Martin Reed: So it sounds like you went down that well-trodden path of, I can recognize probably where this all began. Either I was always a lousy sleeper, or there were some clear triggers for some sleep disruption. And I think most of us, we accept that when we have some difficult nights, if there’s that clear cause, there’s not a whole lot we can do about that. Hopefully once that cause, that trigger is no longer around, or it’s no longer relevant, we’ve adapted to it, our sleep will get right back on track. But sometimes it doesn’t. And that in itself can be a big source of difficult thoughts, emotions, feelings about sleep. And we can start engaging in all those behaviors to try and chase after sleep, to put effort into sleep, try and make sleep happen. And it’s really that response, which is what at this point is keeping the insomnia alive. It’s the oxygen for that insomnia. But we don’t know that at the time. When we are caught up in this struggle, we want to fix it. We don’t know why it’s happening. It feels very mysterious, very unusual. So we start to try. And all these things that we try, they’re often well-intentioned and logical when we think about them. But they can kind of backfire on us. And then that just leads to more effort, more worry, more difficulty. You mentioned that you were finding it really difficult to just fall asleep. When this sleep issue was feeling really mysterious, and it stuck around long after everything in your life had settled down outside of sleep, what kind of things did you try to get things back on track? Amanda Kramer: Tried a lot of different things. I started off by just trying to clean up my sleep environment. I thought maybe it was the mattress’ fault. So I got a new mattress, and got some blackout shades, and earplugs. And just tried to clean the environment, which was good. It was helpful for a couple days, but then I was still not sleeping. So I was trying those CBD gummies because everyone was pushing them on me. And I tried that, and it really did not work. It in fact made me feel very wired at night. And so that was a no. Melatonin, I tried that during the time and that also was okay for maybe a couple nights. But it was like the novelty wore off, and it was back to not being able to fall asleep. So I didn’t know what to do. I ended up taking some over-the-counter sleep aids. I was having an extra nightcap. Anything that would make me feel sleepy. I was just desperate to feel tired. I got to the point where that made me feel very uncomfortable. I did not want to be taking anything. I did not want to be relying on something outside of myself to fall asleep. But I didn’t have the tools. I didn’t know what to do. And I think the last thing I tried was calling my doctor saying, “Help, I’m not sleeping.” She didn’t know what to do with me. So she prescribes another set of pills, and I was very reluctant to go pick them up. But I did. And I knew that I didn’t want to take them. I was like, “This is not the answer.” But I got the pills, and got home, and locked them away in a cupboard. I did not touch them. But wow. I was at square one. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I had tried everything. So on a walk one afternoon, I picked up my phone and I did a search for insomnia and podcast. And I started listening to your advice and all of the interviews. And I really connected to what you were saying and their experience. And I thought, “Yes, this is it. This is what I want to try. I don’t want to be taking pills. I don’t want to be taking drugs. I don’t want to be doing any of that.” I was worried about what that was doing to my health, to my liver. And I just knew that I was stronger than that. I could do it with the right support. Martin Reed: One of the things that I kind of remember when we were working together, I think it was within the first couple of weeks. You actually shared some great insights with me. And a really memorable one was you said to me, “I’ve had some good nights, even when my mind was starting to race and was telling me, ‘You haven’t fallen asleep yet. You’re going to be awake all night. This is going to be a really difficult night.'” Especially on those days before you were due to go into work to teach, because we often put a lot more pressure on ourselves to sleep, because we have this strong connection between how we sleep and our ability to perform during the day, or to live the kind of life we want to live, to feel how we want to feel. Can you tell us a little bit more about that insight, where you found that the mind was telling you all this really difficult uncomfortable stuff about sleep, but then some good sleep happened anyway? I’m just curious to hear a little bit more about your experience with that. Amanda Kramer: Yeah. That was really mind opening, because I was so accustomed to hearing the thoughts you’re not going to sleep, and then not sleeping. So very early on within the program, I stopped taking naps. And I had really started to build really strong sleep drive. I was feeling more tired than ever in a good way, once night came. Because I was taking away those naps and waking up at the same time every morning. And some of those days were a little challenging because I was tired. But oh my gosh, it was beautiful. At the end of the day, I was exhausted and ready for sleep. So in that sense, even if those little worries or anxieties about sleeping crept in, I would generally fall asleep, even though they were there. Because I had this really strong sleep drive that just ended up overriding all of the anxieties. I think that was key for me really, was to take away the naps, and to stop trying to make up for a bad night. Because then I was just not tired enough that night. But if I was really good at sticking to waking up at that same time, and honoring the day, and honoring all my commitments by the night, I was really blissfully tired and ready for sleep. No matter what my brain was saying, and no matter what the little chatter was, I was tired enough for those words to dissipate. Martin Reed: So up to that time, you mentioned that you just removed all those naps. What was your napping routine or structure like? Were you napping every day? When were you napping? How long were you naps? I’m curious to hear a little bit more about that. Amanda Kramer: Yes. After a bad night, I would sleep in a little bit if that was possible to try to make up for the night. And then the napping would usually come in when my daughter went to sleep. I would sneak in a nap around one or two, and I was just so desperate to take the pressure off. So the napping, it was pretty daily. And then I was not yet tired enough that evening to go to sleep. So that was pretty clear to me that eliminating the naps was a very good, important thing to do. Martin Reed: So did you find it quite easy to sleep when you set yourself up for a nap? Amanda Kramer: Yes. Actually, it was. I was so tired and depleted at that time. I don’t remember any difficulty taking those naps. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think that in itself can sometimes be a really good insight. Because after all, if you’re able to sleep during the day, then that means that you must be able to sleep at night too. There’s just some kind of obstacle or barrier getting in the way. The fact that we’re able to nap during the day shows that we can still sleep. We haven’t lost that ability to sleep. But where these naps can often be a double-edged sword is when we have chronic insomnia, we are taking a nap because we just want that sleep to happen. We’re kind of chasing after sleep. We’re so desperate to get that sleep in. We’re chasing after it, so we’re going to be like, “Okay, I’m going to go down for a nap and try and make some sleep happen.” And what can often happen is then, we find it really hard to sleep when we try to nap as well. And then that can generate all these difficult thoughts and feelings about that ability to sleep. “Oh my goodness. I can’t sleep at night, I can’t sleep during the day.” But really the obstacle, the whole barrier is all the same. It’s all the effort that we’re engaged in. That desire to avoid nighttime wakefulness. So the brain’s firing up, being hyper alert to protect us from that wakefulness. So I just find it personally really interesting, the kind of relationship we can have with naps when we are experiencing chronic insomnia. Because on the one hand, we can try to nap, find it really easy to nap. And that in itself can be quite reassuring. But usually not that helpful over the longer term. Because when we relieve that sleep pressure, less time awake during the day means we might get less sleep at night. Then on the flip side, if we try a nap and then no sleep happens, we can become even more concerned, and engage in even more effort, and battling with all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with what we feel is just our inability to sleep. So it was great to hear you describe your personal relationship with naps, and that you found it helpful to just cut them out. Which I’m guessing wasn’t an easy change to make. How did you manage to make that decision and stick to it? Amanda Kramer: I had watched a lot of your tutorials, and so I knew you had mentioned this so many times over, that eliminating naps is really important, creating natural sleep drive. And so I was happy to do it, because I really wanted to try everything. In fact, I found it to be empowering to take the nap away, because I always had to make sure I had to create the space, make sure that… It was almost a lot of work to find the space to nap. But when I realized it was actually working against me, I thought, “This is great. This opens up the day. Now I can follow through with everything that I need to do.” Because I know that was one of your pieces of advice was no matter if it’s a good night’s sleep or not, you honor your commitments. You go to work, and you do your exercise, and you socialize. And that to me was unbelievably liberating, because I was always trying to figure out how to get out of this or get out of that, and try to conserve my energy. When I had made the commitment to honor all my commitments, then I got to enjoy the day. I got to let go of the idea that I had to cancel and really be present in the day, no matter that I might be a little tired. It wasn’t a big deal. I was committed to the day. And even sweeten the deal by doing something nice for myself on a day that might have been exhausted. I take my daughter for a walk or get a treat. So the quality of those days ended up becoming quite good and nice. Because I was so committed to making the days good, and not allowing the sleep to really drive whether or not it was a good or bad day. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think that was something you touched upon when we were working together as well was, I can’t remember at what stage it was. But you had this kind of realization as you were going through things, that how you sleep at night doesn’t always dictate or predetermine the overall quality of your day. That there are other things that influence you. I mean we’re not sugarcoating it. You probably feel better during the day if you had a great night of sleep. But it’s not like a hundred percent of your day is a hundred percent determined by your sleep, a hundred percent of the time. I’m curious to hear when that happened, how that insight affected you. Amanda Kramer: That was the big one. I started to realize the quality of the day was really not dependent on the number of hours of sleep the night before. I could have a decent night’s sleep and then have an awful next day. I could have had a few hours of sleep, but I woke up with gratitude because I had the day. I was going to make the best of the day. I was really committed. After the experience of trying to cancel this and cancel that, I was stepping into the day with a commitment to honor everything. And it gave me a new sense of gratitude. It was tiring. Some of the days were hard, but there were these beautiful moments that ended up happening because I was aware. I was more present and understanding that I was dealing with fatigue, but that it was okay. And I created some really beautiful moments, and then I would look back on the diary and realize this is something that’s happening. The number of hours of sleep is not running parallel with the quality of day. And that really took the pressure off of having the sleep perfectly every night. So that was definitely something that helped take pressure off. Martin Reed: Yeah. Did you find it really hard, especially when you first made this commitment, to pursue stuff that’s enriching, important to you during the day, independently of sleep? Because when we are caught up in all the fatigue, and the anxieties, and all that stuff that comes with insomnia, usually our brain is screaming at us, “You can’t do this stuff. We’ve got to stay home. We’ve got to conserve energy. We got to withdraw. We got to maybe try napping.” All these things it tries to do that can end up distracting us and moving us away from the kind of life you want to live, which then leads to more pressure to sleep and to fix the problem, control what we can’t control. But how did you make that commitment to do that stuff, even when you were feeling really not good? Amanda Kramer: I think it was because I started to trust the process, because I had seen already firsthand how my sleep was getting better, and how it was getting better pretty quickly. So I trusted the structure, and I just felt so committed to the process because I was so tired of insomnia. That I was in it a hundred percent. And I wanted to experience joy. I wanted to make that choice to experience the day in all of its color and vibrancy, and not let a bad night’s sleep take that away. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it can be really helpful. We don’t have to do huge things, especially if we’re feeling like we’re in a lot of pain, a lot of struggle. I like how you touched upon being kind to yourself. So it might just be going out for a treat with your daughter or by yourself. Just doing something nice for yourself. It’s so easy when we’re struggling to end up getting completely distracted by the struggle, and that just becomes our entire focus. And it’s understandable, because struggle doesn’t feel good. But it can just be so distracting and lead to us engaging in actions that aren’t aligned with the person we want to be, that aren’t aligned with our values. We end up becoming the person that we don’t really want to be, not doing the kind of things we want to do. And that generally doesn’t make us feel any better. And it gives that weight of insomnia. It gives it even more influence over our lives. So I think being kind to ourselves, committing to doing things that are important to us. They might not feel as good. They might not even feel good full stop when we are really struggling. We can’t control how we feel, right? But we can control our actions. So the most important thing is just the fact we are doing these things. We’re doing things that are important to us. And like you touched upon, even when we are really in the depths of the struggle, there are often a couple of moments… Maybe only one moment. But there’s usually a couple of moments during the day that are a little bit better, even if it’s only fleeting. And I think it can help to just be more attuned to those positive moments, to open ourselves up to them. Because so much of our lives, whether we have insomnia or not, we are engaged in autopilot, right? Because we’re thinking about, “All right, I’ve got to wash these dishes. What’s next? Then I’ve got to put the kids to bed, then I’ve got to do this.” We are always off somewhere. Our mind is always off somewhere, and not a hundred percent engaged in where we are and what we’re doing. And the fact is there’s good stuff all around us pretty much all of the time, if we’re able to notice it. So even when we don’t feel good, maybe we can just look around or just give ourselves the opportunity to notice one good thing. One thing that is beautiful, or enjoyable, or makes us feel good, or is interesting. Just one thing to remind us that there is still some opportunity for good stuff, even when we are really caught up in that struggle. Amanda Kramer: Absolutely. Looking back on the beginning stages of the process, the program with you, I do have some very beautiful memories of those tired, tired days. These little gems that appeared, like just that walk along the lagoon with my daughter. I remember feeling so tired that day and after picking her up, I was like, “Let’s go home.” No, let’s not go home. Let’s enjoy the day. And we took that moment, and I will always remember that moment. Maybe there’s something pure about those experiences. Because of the exhaustion, you kind of shed everything else. You shed whatever other daily chatter goes on. It’s like those moments, even though it was during a very tired time, it’s a very positive memory, those little treats or gems that come through on those days. One more thing that really helped me get through those tired days was the information about how there’s not necessarily medical evidence that supports the fact that not getting a lot of sleep is bad for your health or somehow damages you. Because I always thought that when I wasn’t getting enough sleep, that I was somehow doing harm to my body. So knowing that all that stuff out in the internet, all that information is pretty misleading, and that there really isn’t any evidence that it hurt you or harms you. That really started to take the pressure off too. “It’s okay. You’re tired. You’re tired, but you’re not really damaging yourself by not getting enough sleep.” That’s really helpful. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. As long as we are giving ourselves the opportunity to sleep, the body’s always going to generate at the very least, the minimum amount of sleep it needs to survive. A lot of the headlines and the news articles out there, I think some are downright just misleading. And others are just really easy to misinterpret. A lot of them aren’t looking at people with chronic insomnia. A lot of them aren’t even using human beings. They’re using animals, and extrapolating their best guesses from there. And a lot of them are using sleep deprivation. They’re taking people and then deliberately interrupting their sleep, and then seeing what effect that has. So they’re not letting these people sleep, and then they find out that leads to worry, depression, and anxiety. Well if someone kept waking me up every hour, then yeah, I’m sure I would feel that way. But chronic insomnia itself is different. Because people with chronic insomnia, they’re giving themselves opportunity to sleep. Often an excessive amount of opportunity for sleep. People with chronic insomnia tend to be going to bed way earlier than an average sleeper, staying in bed later in the morning, napping during the day more often. Engaging in all this additional opportunity for sleep to happen. But the fact of the matter is we don’t have one study that has found chronic insomnia to cause any specific health condition whatsoever. We have studies that associate sleep duration or insomnia with different things. But none have found that it specifically causes it. So that can be a big source of difficulty, and confusion, and worry, and anxiety when we come across all this stuff. Which is another reason why sometimes, it can be helpful to free up all that time that you might be spending engaged in ongoing research. That endless ongoing research that’s so easy to get caught up in, because we’re so desperate to fix the problem. And maybe just use that time in a way that might be more helpful to us in terms of living the kind of life we want to live. Living for now, rather than living for what might be in the future. Many of us have done a lot of research. It’s probably unlikely we’re going to uncover anything brand new. We’ll probably just end up getting caught up in that rabbit rabbit hole of despair, and difficult news articles and stories that you just touched upon. How about we just free ourselves from that? Just do something more important to us instead. That can be so helpful. Amanda Kramer: Yeah. It was recommended that I talked to someone early on, talk through the issues. I know I had dealt with some issues, but I really felt like most of them had settled, and I didn’t really need to open up those issues again. I really needed somehow to just work on the sleep. I didn’t think that it was something I needed to talk to a therapist about. So that was a confusing moment. Even the doctor had pressured me, “Speak to someone. Talk to someone. Talk through the issues.” And I thought, “Well, that would’ve been helpful maybe a few years ago. But now I’m here, and I’ve healed from a lot of that stuff. I’m just still not sleeping.” Martin Reed: So I think after we’ve been working together, I think it was towards the end of the time we were working together. I think we were about six weeks or so in. You mentioned that you were finding it quite remarkable, the fact you were experiencing a number of good nights of sleep, consecutive all in a row. You said you were feeling better during the day, more productive. Feeling more optimistic than you may have done before. But you’re a human being, so you still had some difficult nights from time to time. At this point, did you find that when those inevitable difficult nights happened, that your response to them somehow changed? Maybe they had less of an effect or an influence on you. I’m curious to hear how you dealt with those nights as you went along. Amanda Kramer: Yeah. What I had decided to do was to set up a little corner for myself. No matter if it was going to be a good night or a bad night, didn’t matter. I just set up a comfortable chair with a book and a lamp. And so I knew that I had this spot to go to if I needed to. And that really gave me a source of comfort. So getting up is never easy. It’s hard to do. But knowing that there’s this comfortable, safe space to go to with a good book that I enjoy. I mean, it’s not half bad. It’s quiet, I’m alone, and I get to read a good book, and then eventually get back to sleep, or go back to bed. So really setting up that space helped. Because at first, I didn’t really know what to do. I was okay trying to figure out a project that would be quiet. So I decided that really, I got into biographies. I really started to read a lot of them. And so okay, I’m going to pick a couple, and I’m going to put them on the table, and they’re there if I need them. So it actually ended up being quite enjoyable. I mean, it’s hard to get up. But then once I was there, it was quite enjoyable. And that made it easier. And again, trusting the process. Trusting the process because it was working for me. So it was really no panic involved in the nights and getting up on those off nights. Because it was working, I was sleeping better, and there was a plan. I felt like I had a plan in place, and I was falling back on it. And that really, really helped. Martin Reed: So it sounds like what you’re referring to there is maybe before in the past when you’re having a difficult night, a lot of wakefulness. You’re just kind of at loss. “What do I do?” And our usual default human behavior I think is to try to achieve what you want to achieve. So when we are really struggling with all that wakefulness, we’ll maybe double down and try even harder to fall asleep. Put pressure on ourselves to fall asleep, a lot of tossing and turning. A lot of unpleasant wakefulness. And like you just touched upon, we do actually have an alternative option available to us. And that is to just do anything else that’s more pleasant when being awake doesn’t feel good. Because I think most of us know from experience at that point that sleep is unlikely to happen right at this moment. And it doesn’t feel good to be tossing and turning here. So how about we just do something else that we know is going to be a little bit more pleasant? It might not be super enjoyable. It might not even be enjoyable. It just has to be something that’s more pleasant compared to what we’re currently doing. So it sounds like for you, you found it really helpful to just have a plan in place. “If it doesn’t feel good for me to be awake, I’m just going to get out bed. I know where I’m going to go. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to read this book. And then when conditions feel like they might be better for sleep to happen, I’ll return to bed.” And just kind of repeat the process. Okay to stay in bed when we’re awake for as long as it feels okay to be awake. But then if it starts to feel unpleasant, we’ve always got that opportunity to do something instead. Am I getting the gist of it right? Was that the kind of approach that you took? Amanda Kramer: Yeah. And that approach worked anywhere. I was always very nervous about traveling, going to someone else’s house, or being in a hotel. What if insomnia strikes? What am I going to do? But I worried less, much less about it because I had this plan. Which was just a book and a comfortable place to sit. So I just made sure that I had those things with me. And then before heading to bed, I would set up the little corner and know that it was there. And that really helped so much. Martin Reed: So did you find that you were a bit like a human yo-yo getting in and out, in and out of bed throughout the night? Or were you just out of bed, read a few chapters, and then you just go back to bed? Or was it just all different every single night, and you didn’t care as long as reading was more pleasant than struggling? Amanda Kramer: Early on in the process, it was a lot of up and down for sure. Few times a night, maybe. Again, less panic though. Less stress associated with being up because I had that plan that I could fall back on, and I really trusted it. “So here we go up. Get out of the bed because bed doesn’t feel good right now.” It felt so much better to be outside of bed. My heart rate went down. “Okay, I’m here. This is pleasant.” And then once I started feeling like, “Okay, I think I could enjoy the bed again,” went back. At the beginning of the process, there was a lot of up and down, but not stressful. I really got to the point where if a bed wasn’t feeling good, I would get out, read, and then come back to bed and fall asleep. So all of a sudden, I can’t remember exactly when the transition happened. But I realized that it was really just one time getting out, and that’s all I needed. And then I started to build confidence at that point. “Okay. So if it’s not happening, then maybe it’s just one time out. But maybe not.” My confidence started to build, so it got easier and easier. But the beginning stages are hard. Really hard. Really hard to get yourself up out of bed when you’re so exhausted and you just want to sleep. But it really does in fact feel so much better to be out of bed on those nights. Martin Reed: Yeah. I love how you described it, that it’s not easy. But it’s often more appealing than what the alternative is, which is to just stay in bed when it really just doesn’t feel good to be putting ourselves through that, in the hope that maybe sleep will happen. When we stay in bed, it doesn’t feel good. And we often fall into that trap of trying, putting effort into sleep, or trying to push away all the difficult thoughts and feelings that our brain is going to be generating as it tries to protect us from what it thinks of wakefulness as this physical threat. The brain doesn’t know the difference between a physical threat and an imagined threat. As far as the brain’s concerned, when you are trying to sleep, it thinks there’s an alligator under the bed about to get its teeth around you. The brain doesn’t know the difference. It’s trying to protect you, but it’s generating all this stuff that doesn’t feel good. Trying to push it away engages us in a battle. Trying to sleep never really works because we can’t control sleep anyway. Also, all we want to do is just remove the effort, kind of untangle ourselves from that struggle. And what can we control at the end of the day? The only thing we can control are our individual actions, our own bodily movements. So if we are struggling, we’re not feeling good, unfortunately we can’t control how we feel. Not sleeping, unfortunately we can’t control sleep. But what we can do is maybe get out bed or even stay in bed if we prefer, but just do something that makes that wakefulness more pleasant. And that’s really all we can do is engage in actions that are more appealing, more helpful than the alternative option. Amanda Kramer: Yeah, it sure does beat just lying in bed flipping and flopping, and waiting and stressing. Just the act of getting up out of bed feels good. “Okay, I’m going to try something else.” Martin Reed: Going to something you were talking about earlier on where you said maybe reducing the amount of time that you allot for sleep was something that was helpful. Which basically, all it comes down to for people not completely familiar with it is we are just looking to spend an amount of time in bed quite close to the amount of sleep we’re getting at the current time, rather than the amount of sleep we want to get. Because often, our temptation is to spend more time in bed, to give ourselves more opportunity to sleep. But often, all that does is just set us up for more nighttime wakefulness. There’s more opportunity to spend time awake at night. So if we’re, for example, averaging let’s say five hours of sleep, let’s see if we can get the amount of time we spend in bed closer to five hours rather than seven, eight, nine, or 10 hours. And often, how that helps is it prevents us from chasing after sleep because now we’ve got that earliest possible bedtime. We’ve got a consistent out of bedtime in the morning. But where I think it can really help is often, it brings back a sense of sleepiness rather than just fatigue as bedtime approaches. I think it’s really easy to misinterpret fatigue and sleepiness. Feeling really run down, worn out, exhausted, groggy. Sometimes that might not be sleepiness. That might be fatigue, just exhaustion, feeling worn out. And that doesn’t always lead to sleep. The only thing that leads to sleep is sleepiness itself. And when we get back that sense of sleepiness like, “I’m actually finding it hard to stay awake now,” I think that can just be so empowering. I remember one exchange that we had was you had a lot of these things that you felt you had to do in the evening to invite sleepiness to happen. And that was one of your concerns. You said to me, “I really want to move away from all these rituals and activities I’m kind of imposing on myself in an attempt to get sleepiness to happen. But I’m kind of nervous that if I start moving away from them, then I’m never going to feel sleepy.” Do you feel that having that sleep window helped you with that transition from moving away from all these additional rituals and routines you were putting on yourself, because the sleep window itself was helping you rediscover that sense of sleepiness in the evening? Amanda Kramer: Most definitely. And that really happened right off the bat. Really feeling a sense of sleepiness come in. At the end of the night, I had not experienced that in so long. I was always so up at night. But when we started to implement the sleep window and taking away the naps, I started to feel this natural sleepiness come in, in the evening. And it just felt like a sweet relief. I didn’t have to try to bring it on. It was naturally happening. “Okay, the body knows what it’s doing if you allow it to do it.” And yeah. Like I said earlier, that deep sense of sleepiness was overriding that any sort of nervousness there might have been otherwise it really took over. So sleep was much easier. Martin Reed: Exactly. As I like to say all the time, sleep always happens in the end. So the longer we are awake for, the harder it becomes to remain awake. And that in itself can be so reassuring, because it’s so easy to believe that I’m feeling anxious, for example. Or I feel my heart racing. And because I’m feeling those things, sleep just can’t happen now. But the truth is sleep can still happen. If we’ve been awake for long enough and the body needs sleep to happen, the sleep will still happen. These things can make sleep more difficult. If we’ve got a lot of that worry and that anxiety, maybe that kind of hurdle that sleep has to get over is up here instead of down here. But the longer we’re awake, that sleep drive builds and builds, eventually no matter what, it’s always going to get higher than even the most intense anxiety or physical sensations of arousal. And I think just recognizing, like we were discussing earlier, the presence of difficult thoughts or difficult feelings, difficult emotions, don’t mean that sleep won’t happen. You can experience that stuff and still even have good nights. I think what can definitely make sleep really difficult is when we engage in a battle with all that stuff. These thoughts are really difficult, so we might try not to think them, or we might try and push them away when they come into our mind. And all those emotions as well, often they don’t feel good. Especially in the middle of the night when we’re all by ourselves. So again, we try to fight them, try to avoid them. And I think engaging in that battle and that struggle is probably what’s more disruptive to sleep than just their presence. If we can get to a point where we just allow them to come and go as they want, which is obviously easier said than done. But if we can get to that point where we just allow them to sit there, drift in and out as they want, rather than getting involved in that battle, they become far less influential over our sleep. And what we do during the day too. Amanda Kramer: And just a couple of nights experiencing the anxiety come up in that anticipation of not sleeping and then sleeping. And even though there was that stress and anticipation or whatever that was, that sleep still came that night. That happened maybe once or twice, and that started to really build my confidence. That’s not going to determine if I sleep or not. That’s not necessarily going to determine whether or not I sleep. And that was very powerful. Martin Reed: Yeah. Have you found that over this whole process, just looking back on everything, that your relationship with those thoughts and those feelings, those emotions as and when they occur has changed? Because my guess is that you still experience some difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions because you’re a human being. So you’re going to experience the full range of the human experience. But has there been a change just in the way you kind of respond to them or the effect that they have over you, the influence they have over you? And why do you think that is, if there has been that change? Amanda Kramer: That’s a good question. I see the thoughts now. I see them. I tell them, “I see you. You are not me. You don’t define me. You are separate from me.” I really do kind of almost have a conversation with these thoughts. You’re like, “You’re trying to disrupt me, and I see you doing that.” And in a way, doing that makes them sometimes disappear. Makes them less powerful by seeing them as separate. And what has helped me too, a lot, just find a sense of peace, and quiet that chatter is taking that last hour or so before bed, and finding a quiet seat, and taking time to read those books. I slipped into this routine where I’m just, doesn’t matter what time it is. At some point, I’ll just let go of the clocks altogether because it’s just late enough. And it’s a nice quiet moment to take in the night and then go to sleep when I feel sleepy. And it really just takes the pressure off. And if there is any of that chatter about not sleeping, or what if you don’t sleep and that kind of stuff it’s, “I see you. I see what you’re trying to do. But I’m going to take myself over here and have just a relaxing moment with my book. This is my time, my space.” And just trying to really stay empowered, because we have so much power and control. Martin Reed: I love that sentence that you said. Just saying, “I see you.” I think what it comes down to is acknowledgement. You are just acknowledging that thought, or that feeling, or that emotion is present. “I see you.” You’re saying it. Whether it’s in your mind or out loud, you’re acknowledging its presence. And I think that in itself can just be so helpful. Because just the fact that we’re acknowledging something that we’re thinking or feeling, even when it’s difficult, first and foremost tells the brain, “Okay, you are listening to me. So maybe I don’t have to yell quite so loud so you are listening.” But then just the act of acknowledging. Especially when we’re able to say, “Okay, this is a thought or this is a feeling. This is an emotion.” It’s not me, but it’s something that’s happening in my mind. My mind is generating this thought, this feeling, this emotion. And now I get to choose how to respond. Is that helpful? Is this thought going to help me right now? Is it actionable? Is it about something I have control over? If it is, great. If it’s not, then maybe we just, “All right, well thanks brain. I’m listening. I see you. I acknowledge what you’re telling me. But now I’m going to move on and redirect my focus or my attention on this instead.” But I think that acknowledgement is key, and your description of just saying, “I see you.” I think that’s a great way of just acknowledging what we’re thinking or what we’re feeling, and not getting caught up in that really exhausting struggle with trying to get rid of what we are thinking or we’re feeling. Amanda Kramer: You made the comparison of insomnia being like a bully that wants to come back and try to wreak havoc. And if you give that bully the time of day, then they’re going to get off on that, and they’re going to keep going. If you don’t let the bully phase you, then they might disappear and try to bother someone else. I love that analogy. Martin Reed: I think that that’s a really helpful way of exploring our relationship with our thoughts and our feelings. So many of them don’t feel good when we’re caught up in insomnia, so we want to fight them. But over the long term, I just don’t think it’s a battle we can win. We can maybe distract ourselves in the short term, or try and convince ourselves to think differently in the short term. But in the long term, I don’t think so. If we could do that, then we would be able to just fall in love, and genuinely love that person, and live happily ever after forever and ever, for the rest of our lives. We might be able to fool ourselves for a little bit of time, but probably not for the rest of our lives. Because we just can’t control those thoughts and those feelings. And some make us feel good. Some don’t. But when we don’t get caught up in the battle with them, they tend to hang out. Then they disappear, then they might come back. They might hang out for longer, then disappear. But they’re always transient. It can feel like they’re always there, but they come and go when we are able to free ourselves from that battle with them. Amanda Kramer: And taking the day like we talked about before, really enjoying the day, and finding the joy in those moments. I feel like it’s strengthening our drive to help to get rid of those bullies. Because you’re not taking all the anxiety about, “Well, it’s nighttime. Am I going to sleep?” And no, you’re present. You’re present. You’re arrived in your day, and you’re not allowing that anxiety to enter in and stay there. Martin Reed: Yeah. Especially if we can do all that stuff even when the mind is giving us all this difficult stuff to deal with. So it could be during the day, the brain’s like, “You’re too exhausted. You can’t do that today.” So it could just be like, “All right, I see.” You might even name that thought. That’s the doom and gloom thought, or it’s the you’re too tired thought. “Thanks brain. I know you’re looking out for me. But you know what? I’m going to do this anyway. Let’s see. Maybe I can, maybe I can’t. But I’m just going to give it a try.” And the more we can do that, we just separate the thoughts that we have from our actions. The thoughts that we have don’t always have to dictate our behaviors. We are in the middle of that. We always get to choose. And it can be so helpful. I think it can be empowering. Because we realize that no matter how difficult or intense the thought or a feeling that we have, we always get to choose how to respond. And really, it’s how we choose to respond that determines whether we engage in a struggle, which is really exhausting, and can kind of distract us, and take all of our energy from us, and we end up moving away from the kind of life we want to live. Or whether we kind of redirect our attention on what we have control over, even when all this difficult stuff’s going on. We make that conscious choice that I’m going to do something that helps me take the other path towards the kind of life I want to live. And I just think it can be really empowering, and it can just free up so much of our energy to do what matters. Amanda Kramer: Yes. And there are also some very well-meaning people that might give that advice too. Like, “You’re too tired. You should rest. You should stay home.” There might be those supportive people in your life that’s giving you that advice. So it’s important to stay true and stay focused, and committed on the path. Martin Reed: It also goes back to what you were saying earlier is we need to be kind to ourselves too. We don’t have to be a superhero every day. “I’m going to do every single thing on my list no matter what.” We might have a day where we just need to take care of ourselves, whatever that might mean for us. Just being kind to ourselves, whether it means talking to ourselves in a kind way because we can be so hard on ourselves when we’re caught in a struggle. Just talking to ourselves kindly. And behaving in a way that’s kind to ourselves. And there might be days where we need some rest or we need to treat ourselves. Let’s do that. We don’t have to be a superhero every day. We’re human beings. What can be helpful is just being kind to ourselves, and just engaging in things that are important to us, no matter how small those things might be. So we’ve talked about a few different things. A few different changes that you made while we were working together. As I talk whilst this freight train is just running behind me in the background. But we talked about the sleep window that you found helpful. Just allotting and amount of time for sleep that’s more or less aligned with the amount of sleep you tend to be averaging at the current time. You gave yourself a plan for responding to nighttime wakefulness. If you’re awake during the night, that’s okay. But if it doesn’t feel good, I’ve got the opportunity to do something else, and I’ve got a clear plan in place so there’s no ambiguity. So if it doesn’t feel good to be awake, I got that little corner set up somewhere. I’m going to read a book. That’s where I’m going to go. If things start to feel more appropriate for sleep, then I’ll go back to bed. Repeat as needed. I’m going to get out of bed around the same time each day. I’m going to avoid those daytime naps. I’m going to acknowledge the difficult stuff I’m feeling, rather than trying to battle with it. I’m going to do stuff that matters to me during the day. Whether that’s just being kind to myself. Or engaging in activities that are important, enriching, meaningful, aligned with my values. And avoid the daytime naps as well. So we’re just removing ourselves from all that effort to sleep, to chase after sleep, to make sleep happen. That’s a lot of stuff we covered. Was there anything else that you wanted to mention that we haven’t covered? Amanda Kramer: I really find a lot of solace in the buffer hour that we have before bed. That has become still so important to me. Even though I’ve become a very consistent sleeper for the most part now, I am just really true to this beautiful time before bed. And it’s not this time that I use to prepare for sleep. It’s not like in preparation for sleep. It’s just this space that is for me. Daughter’s asleep and husband’s usually asleep. So I get to just take in that little bit of night. I really love that it’s there, and it’s given me a nice relationship with the nighttime. I try not to put pressure on that time, because it’s not really about going to sleep. It’s just about enjoying that quiet, peaceful part of the night. Martin Reed: Yeah. I’m glad that you mentioned that again, because it’s something that can trip us up. And we talked about it a little bit earlier, about how we can… I think a lot of it comes to either well-intentioned advice from friends or looking online, “Do this before you go to bed.” Whether it’s take a shower, turn off all the lights, turn off the TV, drink a warm glass of milk, or some sleepy tea or stuff like that. It’s so easy to add all these rituals before bed. But the truth is there’s no ritual that’s going to make sleep or sleepiness happen. All we’re doing is just engaged in more effort around sleep, and that’s completely counterproductive. But what can be helpful is just giving us ourselves time in the evening before going to bed, that’s just for us. So let’s say an hour. An hour before we’re planning on going to bed, that’s just me time. I’m just going to do stuff that I want to do, that I personally find relaxing or enjoyable. And I think that’s as far as we need to go with it. It just needs to be time that we enjoy, to help us make that transition between our wakeful lives, with all that pressure and struggle that we have to deal with. To getting to a place where we just can decompress a little bit. And it can be just so powerful to have that time for ourselves, to do whatever we want to do before we go to bed. Amanda Kramer: There was a moment in time where I was really trying to figure out what to do during that hour, which kind of goes perfectly alongside trying to figure out what to do to set yourself up well for sleep, the whole day trying to set. It’s like that’s not really what it’s about, is it? It’s not about doing the perfect thing. It’s really just about doing something enjoyable, whatever that is. It was stretching, it was writing, or it was reading. It changed, it morphed, and it wasn’t necessarily one particular thing. But for a little while, I was trying to seek the correct activity, which was really counterproductive. Martin Reed: It’s so easy to look back on it now, isn’t it? And just recognize all those things that we were engaged in, that we’re able to reflect on and be like, “That wasn’t helpful.” But at the time, we’re engaging all these experiments because we want to fix the problem that we’re going through. And sometimes, we might feel like, “I did that and then I slept well. So now as long as I keep doing that thing, I’m all good.” But then what tends to happen is because that thing wasn’t what generated sleep, when we then have a difficult night, we’re left scrambling for a new thing. We just get caught up in that rabbit hole. It’s a process to get to that point. I don’t think there’s an easy magic switch that just overnight, we have this big revelation, and we’re able to drop all that temptation to engage in rituals, and safety behaviors, and chasing after sleep. I think it is a process, and it takes a lot of practice. And there’s ups and downs along the way. Using your experience from when we started to explore these changes to you getting to the point where you felt, “I don’t think that insomnia is this big influencer over my life anymore. It feels like it’s kind of in the rear view mirror now rather than a huge movie screen in front of my face, blocking out everything else in my life.” How long would you say that process took? Amanda Kramer: Maybe six months, for me. It got better and better. I mean, I felt like I was on a good trajectory, with some disruptions here and there. But really in order for me to feel okay, I have given myself now all of the space during the day to do what I do, to care for myself, to care for my family. All that, do my work, and not have to constantly be figuring out how I’m going to be sleeping, or what’s going to happen. Because that took up so much of my thinking. I think that was about half a year. But it was such a clear progression of sleeping better and gaining more and more confidence. The more better nights I had, the more confidence I had. So I felt like I was becoming stronger and more trusting of myself. Martin Reed: Yeah, that’s great. I asked you that because I was suspecting that you were going to say something along the line of months. I think it’s helpful because we have to recognize that it’s a process. It usually takes time. Just as it took time for the insomnia to develop, it’s going to take time to pick away at it, and to change all those habits, or rituals, or routines that we’re currently engaged in to kind of unstick ourselves. And it takes time. And we often experience ups and downs along the way. And during those difficult times, the brain starts firing up again, telling us, “You’re struggling.” Generates all those difficult thoughts and feelings. But that stuff we can’t control. What we can control is our actions. So if we can just stay committed to ensuring that our behaviors are helping to set the stage for sleep, that’s really all we can do. And that our behaviors are just helping us move toward the kind of life we want to live, even when all this difficulty and struggle is still present. That’s really all we can do. And as long as we can stay committed to that, we tend to find we are not getting rid of difficult thoughts and feelings. They’re always going to be with us. But they’re going to have less of an influence over us. And then in turn, the insomnia or sleep and wakefulness, regardless of what that looks like, tends to have less of an influence over us. Because our focus now is on all the things we can control, and all the things that free us up to just live the kind of life we want to live. And when we do that, all the difficult stuff still there, but just maybe a lower volume. A progressively lower volume, and less influential over our behaviors. So Amanda, what would you say an average night is like for you these days? If you had to reflect on what a typical night is for you, what would that be like? Amanda Kramer: Typical night, I would around 10:00 or so, just turn down the house and have, again, that hour. Pretty quiet, very relaxing time. And then when I’m sleepy, feel sleepy, I go to bed. And I’ve been getting maybe seven hours of sleep at night. Seven typically. And I don’t need anything. I don’t take anything. I don’t need any of those pills. I don’t need any of that outside stuff. I just rely on myself. And generally, nights are good. Generally, I sleep well. Every now and then, there’s a little disruptive evening. And I deal with that, and then I’m generally back on track. And I am feeling more energetic during the day. I feel like I have more clarity during the day, because I’m not taking all that stuff. I remember pretty early on actually in the program, I felt like I could see colors and hear sounds differently, clearer. There was this clarity. So really beautiful stuff, and a real gratitude. Because I know what it feels like to not get good sleep. So then to get the sleep, to wake up to know, “I did it. I’m proud of myself. I didn’t need to take some pills. I didn’t need to do it. I did it myself. My body knows what it’s doing.” I still do. A year later, I wake up feeling proud every morning. “I did it.” It feels like a real accomplishment, and I carry that with me. Martin Reed: That’s great. Well Amanda, I’m really grateful for the amount of time you’ve spent with us just talking about your own story, your own experience. I know everyone listening to this is going to get some value from it. I’ve got some value from it myself, just hearing you describe certain things. I love the way you acknowledge those thoughts and those feelings by just saying things like, “I see you.” I thought that was great. But before I let you go, I did have one last question for you, which I ask every guest. So I don’t want you to feel left out. And it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they just cannot do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Amanda Kramer: I would say that I understand what they’re going through. The loneliness at night, those feelings of isolation. And that I really totally understand how hard it is, but that they’re not alone. They might feel like they’re alone, but they’re not. And that the human body and brain is so strong and resilient. And I really believe that it can readapt. It can be reconditioned. And that’s just exactly what this program did for me. In the darkest days, I did not think I’d be able to fall asleep again. I just did not think I could do it on my own. I thought I’d be just taking pills for the rest of my life. But everything’s dumped, and I’m doing it. And it’s because this program helped to just reshape some of my habits and my thinking around sleep. So it works, and it’s powerful. And it takes a lot of work, and it takes a commitment and a little bit of pain upfront. But it is so worth it in the long term. You will sleep again, and you’ll do it on your own. I’m a big believer, so take the leap of faith. Martin Reed: That’s great. I think that’s a fantastically positive note to end on. So thank you again, Amanda, for taking the time to come onto the podcast. Amanda Kramer: It’s my pleasure. Thanks Martin. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Eddie struggled with sleep for over 10 years. During that time he would experience a lot of ups and downs — whenever he thought his sleep was back on track, things would get difficult again. The more difficult sleep proved to be, the more he would struggle. And, when he struggled, he found himself doing less of the things that mattered to him. Eddie’s transformation began when he moved away from chasing after sleep and practiced habits that helped create and maintain good conditions for sleep. Perhaps most importantly, he also took the time to identify what insomnia seemed to be stopping him from doing. What it seemed to be taking from him. And then he started to do those things, to take them back, even after difficult nights. As Eddie shares in this episode, the process wasn’t easy — but having a clear plan in place and committing to that plan, even when things were difficult and even when his mind was trying to distract him and pull him away from that plan, kept him moving forward. Eddie now reflects on his experience with insomnia as something that was actually quite empowering. In Eddie’s own words, he’s not happy he went through this experience but he’s not sad that he went through it, either. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay, Eddie, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Eddie Vaisman: Oh, you’re welcome. Yeah, it’s good to be here. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on. Let’s get started right away and start at the beginning. If you can just tell us a little bit more about when your sleep issues first began, and if you are able to recollect what caused those initial issues with sleep? Eddie Vaisman: Yeah, of course. They began, God many years ago, and it was at a time, it’s interesting, it was at a time when I didn’t really have that much going on in my life. I had made some pretty good money and I was pretty financially secure. And I was able to, this was a weird angle on the thing, but I was able to take a lot of time off and I didn’t have to really work really regularly. And that gave me the freedom to develop bad habits, and that’s where it started. It was for me having the freedom to do whatever I wanted with my day and then actually misusing that freedom in a way that led to sleep problems and stuff like that. I started napping at odd hours, having a really irregular schedule all over the place, and then started having trouble every once in a while. Then started having trouble regularly with it, and then you could say it kind of spiraled from there into becoming a factor in my life that actually started to undermine me and make things a lot more difficult and challenging, so yeah. Martin Reed: It is really interesting you say that you feel it all began when there was probably the least amount of pressure you’ve ever had on yourself to sleep because you didn’t really have that set schedule anymore. And I think that’s really interesting, because I’ve worked with a lot of people that have told me that they slept fine until they actually retired, and it was when they didn’t have that set structure around their day anymore that they tended to find all these sleep issues occurred. I think it’s really interesting, and I’m keen to explore this further with you because I think a lot of people might think that sleep issues come, because we put all this pressure on ourselves to sleep because of that structure that we’ve got in our lives. “I’ve got to be up at a certain time for work, or I’ve got this plan to meet up with someone, or I’ve got to get this done.” But I think it can just as easily happen when we have a complete lack of structure, whether that’s like a self-imposed, we no longer have that structure because either we’ve retired or we’re not working, or we’re on vacation or something like that, or whether it’s something like we are struggling and so we withdraw from all that stuff that would otherwise give structure to our lives. And so it is really interesting once that influence between sleep and our day is our daily structure and the things we have to do, the things we want to do and the things we actually do. There really is that two-way relationship between daytime activity and nighttime sleep. Eddie Vaisman: That was definitely the case for me. As soon as I noticed that that was happening, I started to make efforts to put structure back in my day and started noticing how that was actually helping me. And so now I work as a school teacher, obviously. Well, I mean, not obviously, and I sleep worse when I’m on vacation, oddly enough, because- Martin Reed: Wow. Eddie Vaisman: I have that, because we have a lot of vacation as school teachers, and that can be some of the most challenging sleep time when I don’t really have any pressure, when it’s like I can do whatever I want with my day. I don’t have a lot going on and stuff like that. And then the mind starts to play little tricks on me here and there, you know what I mean? Starts to, I don’t know, obsess about stuff that normally you wouldn’t think about. So yeah, it can definitely work that way. And that was the way that it worked with me. It wasn’t because of stress, or because of a health issue or things going on in my life. It was just the time to think about things that maybe shouldn’t be thought about that much. Martin Reed: Back when you were really tangled up in that struggle, what were the nights like for you? Was there an average night? In what way were you finding sleep to be difficult? For example, was it just first falling asleep, or waking and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep, or a bit of both? Just curious to hear what those nights were like. Eddie Vaisman: Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, through the years you can experience any … I mean, really one of those types of things. Sometimes difficulty falling asleep, sometimes difficulty staying asleep, sometimes a combination. But initially it was difficulty staying asleep. I would always fall asleep really quickly, like within five or 10 minutes, and that had never been a problem for me. But then staying asleep, and I think it was partially because I wasn’t super tired and I had napped three times that day, so my body wasn’t really like, “Oh, I need a ton of sleep anymore.” So, if I’m only sleeping three hours at night, well, you already took three naps today, so it kind of made sense when you really looked at it. But back then I thought, “Oh wait, there’s something wrong here. Why am I not making it through the night?” And I think it was because I was just rested, I just didn’t really need. Although, it didn’t feel like that, it felt uncomfortable during the day, so there was a lot of bad aspects to it. But overall it’s like I was training my body to sleep in little bits, instead of sleep in a big block. And I didn’t know I was training myself to do that, but that’s what I was doing unconsciously and through these habits and then through ways to correct them. And then you’ll try to correct them with the normal stuff, like sleeping pills and stuff like that and doesn’t work, might work for a little while, then stops working and stuff like that. You kind of go through all of those things. You go to the doctor, the doctor tells you there’s nothing wrong with you. I guess it’s probably, I don’t know, the normal protocol a lot of the times. I was really struggling with it and I was really fighting with the whole thing because it felt like something had switched, something had broken that wasn’t broken before, and it was just, again, it’s like your mind plays tricks on you. You keep thinking that there’s something wrong with you, but there really isn’t. Your focus is not a supportive one of you and is not an empowering one, it’s … So, that’s really what was happening to me. But once I learned tools to turn that around and stuff like that with your help and with a bunch of things that I’ve done, I finally figured it out, so yeah. Martin Reed: What were your days like? I think that’s a great description which a lot of people are going to really identify with, that nighttime struggle, waking, and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep and everything that goes on in the mind as a result of that. I’m curious to hear what kind of effect you found this was having on your days too? Eddie Vaisman: Well, I was tired all day. I mean, I was fatigued all day. I found it hard to do everything. I think the biggest part was the psychological aspect really, wasn’t just the fatigue, because I can be tired. Maybe I go for a weekend in Vegas or something like that and I stay up late, but I experienced probably deeper levels of fatigue at those times, but they don’t bother me, I’m not necessarily bothered by them. But this was a fatigue that kind of dragged on all day, especially as a result that I didn’t have much going on, that compounded it. This fatigue was like, I just carried it around from the moment I woke up in the morning and into the moment I was trying to go to bed, whatever time that was. And one of my biggest mistakes was really going to bed early. If I said I made one big mistake that I would consistently keep making over and over again. It’s weird how you can trip over the same crack in the sidewalk over and over again, but that’s exactly what was happening to me. I kept going to sleep early. I kept trying to make up for this. I kept trying to compensate by going to sleep early. That was my method, you know what I mean? And it wasn’t, and sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t, but it would keep me on this cycle, for sure. I could never break the cycle, because especially for me, I don’t know about other people, but especially for me, part of the thing that made it such a challenge was that it would cycle so much. I would go through periods where I was sleeping like a baby, and then I would go through other periods where I was, it was just tragic. So for me, the cycling nature of it was a thing that made it most challenged, because sometimes it would get fixed and sometimes it would get broken. If it was broken consistently, then I might have been more motivated to stay on a certain track. But since it would slowly sometimes slip back into good sleep, that kept me on almost like on an uneven ground where I didn’t know if this was an issue or not. Because sometimes it would be an issue and other times it wouldn’t be an issue where. So for me, that back and forth I think made it especially hard to tackle it, because it just wasn’t consistent one way. It wasn’t always broken. Sometimes it was fixed and sometimes it was broken. And that was a challenge for me. Martin Reed: Those ups and downs can be really difficult. And I think one of the problems when we experience those ups and downs is, it can leave us less motivated to do things like going to bed later on, not trying to chase after that sleep consistently too. Because we’re thinking to ourselves, “Well, why should I be making all these changes developing new, more consistent and different habits if my sleep is just all up and down anyway?” There doesn’t seem to be that correlation between making some consistent changes and enjoying some consistent results. But I think, and something that, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but something which I think you noticed was, there’s always something going on behind the scenes. As long as we can focus our attention on what we can control, so consistent implementation of some habits that help set the stage for sleep and not always responding to differently each night according to how we sleep each night, things do tend to eventually become more consistent. And I think there’s always going to be some ups and downs. For as long as we’re human beings there’s going to be some ups and downs, but if we’re able to implement some changes and commit to doing that consistently, we tend to create better conditions for that consistency in our sleep too. But it is a process and there are always ups and downs along the way, which can definitely be a struggle. And it can be really demotivating too. Was that your experience? Eddie Vaisman: Absolutely. I mean, you said it. I mean, the up and down is what really makes it hard to put your finger on it. And really, because I never took it seriously enough until I reached out for help. I was always in, I was always lying to myself a bit about it. I wasn’t being honest with myself about the level of trouble that this was causing me. I always wanted to pretend it wasn’t a real issue. It was almost like a weird, you could almost equate it with almost like an addiction type of thing. I just wanted to pretend it wasn’t playing a significant role in my life, where it really was, it was really undermining my forward progress in life in a significant way. And I never wanted to give it that type of importance. I wanted to pretend like, yeah, that’s something that I struggle with, but yeah, it’ll go away on its own or something like that. It’s nothing that I need to really deal with and address. That was, if I would have jumped on it sooner, I could’ve caused … I could have saved myself a lot of pain and discomfort and frustration and aggravation and anxiety and all that stuff that goes with it, and fatigue and lack of motivation and all that stuff. I could have saved a lot of that if I would have taken steps earlier. But I just, I did it. I let it sit as this background noise in my life for way too long. And then once I did start to get serious about handling it, that’s the first thing that came to my mind after that, because then you … It’s hard to not beat yourself up a little bit and go, “Oh, man, I should have done this way earlier. What was I doing? Why did I wait this long?” It’s hard to not have, it’s hard for me anyway to not have that reaction to it where it’s like, you want to beat yourself up a little bit about not handling it earlier. But it’s okay. It was all a learning process, and I’ve learned a lot through that as well. That’s one important thing from the whole experience is that you can actually make these lemons into lemonade. I mean, you can actually use it for your growth in a way. And that’s something that I didn’t come to until way later. It’s like, “Okay, this is an unfortunate thing. I’m not happy that I’m going through this. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody and blah, blah, blah.” But the switching gears to turning it into something that can actually benefit to you, that’s a key point right there. When a person hits that point where they go, “Oh, okay, this sucks. But how can I use this to my advantage somehow? Are there ways I could use this to my advantage?” Maybe I can learn sleep techniques that the average person doesn’t know and actually possibly become better at sleeping than the average person. Maybe I can really, maybe it’s something that I can really master in some sense and a skill that I could develop as if I was developing any other skill. And that’s how I look at it now. It’s like now I look at it as a skill that I’ve worked on and I can actually call upon whenever I need to, let’s say enforce it or something like that. It becomes like a tool for you at some point where I can pretty, it’s crazy how good I can sleep now. I can pretty much produce good sleep whenever I want to at this point. I know that we’ll get there in the conversation later, but the skills that I’ve developed, a couple nights ago I had an espresso and then went to bed within an hour later, and I slept like a baby that night. Just to give you just a little precursor to how good you can develop these skills. It can be that, it’s like a light switch now. It’s like, “Okay, I could just turn it on and off whenever I want.” It’s really empowering. And the fact that it’s so empowering, it makes you go, “What else can I be empowered in this way about in my life?” It can really expand into other areas, which we briefly touched on earlier. Martin Reed: You’re not the first person to say that. Once we’ve emerged from all of that struggle and put insomnia behind us, many people feel that they’ve come out of it stronger or a different person and got an aspect of a positive experience from it, which can sound crazy for anyone listening now that’s really struggling. How could any of this be positive? But once we get out of that and it’s behind us and now we are moving forward, a lot of people have told me just what you’ve said, that it’s changed me. I feel like I’ve got more confidence, not only in sleep, but maybe even in other areas of my life that maybe I once struggled with. And I’ve just come out of the whole experience as a stronger, different person. And there has been a little bit of a silver lining to the whole experience. Eddie Vaisman: For me, that’s 100% the case. I feel quite empowered coming out of that experience, and I feel like I have better control of my emotions. I’ve developed, I’ve worked on meditation and just gotten to a really good place with those types of things. So again, I’m not saying I would want to go back to start in square one or I would necessarily call it a happy journey, but the light at the end of the tunnel is that it could morph into something that … Into skills that you didn’t anticipate you’re gaining out of it, so there is a positive thing out of it. And I think that that’s also something that I struggled with a lot. The whole idea that, “Well, why am I going through this? Why am I struggling with this and blah blah?” And just the psychological aspect of, “Why am I being tried like this or what?” It can just be frustrating and it can make you get a little bit down on yourself and stuff like that, and it can have a depressive effect on your psychology and things like that. For me it really taught me how to develop an emotional base and a dedication to something. And it just brought out a strength and skills in me that I would not have developed otherwise. And it’s hard to go as far as to say that I’m happy I went through it, but I’m not sad that I went through it. I’ll go that far. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think that’s fair enough to say, for sure. I think very few of us would wish that upon anyone. All we’re really just trying to say is, once we come out of that journey, often there are some things we can reflect back on from the experience as a whole that maybe have been beneficial. But of course, in an ideal world we would probably never experience all of that struggle in the first place. One thing that you touched upon, which you definitely would like to explore more is, as you said, everything that goes on in your mind, the difficult thoughts, the difficult emotions that come within insomnia. And I remember when we were working together about four weeks into it you shared this really big insight with me and you just said, “Look, Martin, I feel like I’m putting way too much effort into sleep. I’m just trying too hard. I’m trying so hard.” And it’s all that effort that seems to actually be the big source of all that anxiety. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Eddie Vaisman: Yeah. Well, again, it’s the mind thinking about things that it’s not beneficial to think about. It’s like if you were obsessing about, I don’t know, a heartbeat or something like that, it’s like the body knows how to handle those things, so I’m going to jump right to the most powerful technique that helped me stop putting effort. The sleep restriction with that terrible name that it has, with that scary name that it has, the sleep restriction was once we really talked about that and got into that with your coaching, for me that was a huge part of it. I can’t even explain how powerful that technique was for me. And I’ll give people a little bit of insight into how powerful it was for somebody who hasn’t tried it. It’s so powerful and it works so well and it gives you so much confidence in your ability to sleep that it’s easy to slack off on it. And that’s what I did, because it works so well that you start going like, “Oh, I can implement this whenever I want. I don’t need to be so rigid about the rules anymore. I can take a nap and I can do this and I can get lax as far as the rules go.” I’m telling you, don’t do that, because the reason that it works is because you stay strict with it. Even though it’ll give you the confidence that you can actually not implement it and be totally … And kind of be okay with it that, so the reason that I bring that one up is because that’s the thing that really taught me how to not put effort. That’s where I really learned how to not put effort is when I did the sleep restriction. Because the sleep restriction, it’s such a powerful technique that it just takes over all of that thought process of putting effort, not putting effort. It just overrides all of that stuff. I mean, that was my experience with it, and it really starts working quickly and it’s effective. And it taught me what it felt like to get into bed and forget what it’s like to fall asleep. Because before that, when I would get into bed it would be a process to fall asleep. It would be like I would be thinking about it. It would be something that I was putting effort, oh, how do I feel? Am I relaxed? There would be a lot of dialogue that was going on, but with the sleep restriction, it overrides all of that stuff. When you get into bed, you don’t know what happens. Just like you didn’t know what happened when you were a kid and you just get in bed and you just kind of disappear. And then, however many hours later, I mean that the sleep window is, so you just reappear at that time and you go, “Oh, well what happened?” And you could have sworn that it was, I don’t know what amount of time, it could have been 10 minutes. But six hours I’ve gone by and you feel rested and you go, “Oh wait. Okay, that’s what it’s like to not force things or to not put effort or to not do these things. Okay, that’s what that felt like.” Martin Reed: I think one thing you mentioned as well was that you found helpful was you just gave yourself permission to not fall asleep as soon as you got into bed. We can easily put a lot of pressure on ourselves. If we get into bed, if we don’t fall asleep within a certain amount of time, then we start to get worried, “It’s going to be one of those nights, what can I do? I’ve got to try harder to fall asleep.” And something that you told me that you found really helpful is just giving yourself permission for it to take time to fall asleep. And that’s okay. For people that maybe aren’t familiar with sleep restriction and may not have ever heard of that, really it’s just one of these tools, these techniques that we can implement that help just create better conditions for sleep to happen. Because for many of us, when we are caught up in the struggle of chronic insomnia, we really want sleep to happen, probably more than we’ve ever wanted sleep to happen in our lives, so we tend to chase after it. We might start going to bed a lot earlier than we ever did before, or we might start staying in bed a lot later in the day than we ever did before. We might start adding naps during the day, something we might not have done very often before. And all these things just put more pressure on us to sleep. But they also can mean that we go to bed before we’re actually sleepy enough for sleep. And because fatigue, just feeling worn out and exhausted, which is a common symptom associated with chronic insomnia, can easily be mistaken for sleepiness. We might then go to bed when we feel all that fatigue, struggle to fall asleep and then become concerned by it. Whereas the truth is, we might just not have been sleepy enough for sleep. So, with sleep restriction, which is an awful name, it really should just be called bedtime restriction. We’re just restricting the amount of time we spend in bed or a lot for sleep, so it more closely matches what our current situation is. If we’re currently averaging five hours, for example, but spending 10 hours in bed, we’re setting ourselves up for five hours of wakefulness. If we are averaging, say, five hours, how about we spend, let’s say five and a half or six hours in bed? So we’re more closely matching the amount of time we’re allotting for sleep with our current situation. And often that can lead to this big increase in that sense of sleepiness, like real genuine sleepiness before going to bed where we’re actually finding it hard to stay awake. And that’s something that many of us are kind of lost that sensation and just the return of that sensation alone can be so powerful. And some people can get results really quickly just from changing the amount of time they allot for sleep. For other people it takes longer, and there’s all other different techniques that we can explore too. But really all we’re doing is just reducing the amount of time available for nighttime wakefulness, and we’re preventing ourselves from chasing after sleep because we’re giving ourselves an earliest possible bedtime and a consistent out of bedtime in the morning morning. And that can just be really helpful over the longer term for creating better conditions for sleep to happen. And you touched upon at the start of our discussion, you mentioned those ups and downs. They happened before we were working together and they happened whilst we were working together. And I did just want to spend a couple of minutes talking about this, because it’s easy to believe that when we start to make these changes, we should just experience consistent improvement every night should be as good as or better than the last. But the truth is, we’re human beings, so there’s going to be some ups and downs. There’s going to be difficult nights, just like we have some difficult days. Every day isn’t always as good as or better than the last day. And the same thing goes with how sleep goes, how the nights go. Now you’re able to look back. What do you think is the best way to deal with all those ups and downs? Eddie Vaisman: Well yeah, people I think should write that down somewhere is that progress is not linear in this game, unfortunately. That I very much experienced that progress is not linear. There were ups and downs, but if you stick to the techniques, the ups and downs start being, you just start having less and less of that and you start to have a different experience of it. It’s funny, because when you expect that something’s not going to go great or smoothly for a while, you’re in it, you’re committed to it, it’s not as bad. But if you have all these expectations that sleep needs to be X, Y, and Z, and this many hours and stuff like that, you’re going to have rougher nights that way. I think starting on a course of helping yourself heal through this and having that commitment to it makes the rocky road more bearable. Because if you’re on a journey somewhere and the road is rough but you know you’re going somewhere and you’re committed to it, then it’s more bearable for some reason. But if you’re just traveling aimlessly and you’re on a rough road and you seem to be making no progress and it starts to wear on you psychologically in a very different way. I think the commitment to get better, and for me to work with somebody was key, because I had hired people as coaches, I mean, to do all types of stuff in my life. As far as everything from therapy and meditation and exercise and stuff like that. So, hiring a coach to help with the sleep thing did not seem all that weird. Even though, I mean, on the surface it sounds like, “Wait, what? You’re hiring a coach for sleep?” Well, that’s a little bit unusual, but the dividends that it can pay, and the happiness that it can contribute to your life of having good sleep, it’s well worth it, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. So, it’s more about that. It’s more about changing the mindset from, “Well, this sucks and this and has been going up and down for years or months or whatever it is. And I don’t know where this is going.” To a mindset of, “Well, yeah, this sucks and this is rough and stuff like that, but we’re going somewhere. I got a coach, I’m working with them.” And then you start to see a payoff. You start to get, “Oh wow, that was better than I thought that that would go.” You start to have some of those going on, and then you gain that confidence and you work from there. So again, it’s just another mental switch that you just have to now look at it differently, that you’re doing something here. You’re not letting the condition control you, you’re controlling it. You’re not controlling it, but you’re taking responsibility for it. And I think that was a big thing for me. I never took proper responsibility for it. I remember a friend telling me before, I was complaining about it to a friend, and my friend telling me and me getting mad at my friend, but my friend told me, “Well, you must be getting something from it because you keep doing it.” And I was offended at that, of course. I was like, “Well, what do you mean I keep doing it? I don’t keep doing it. It keeps happening to me.” That’s important too for me. That was huge for me, taking responsibility for my position and taking the steps to rectify. Because we can really develop habits that we are unhappy with and stick to them unhappily for some odd reason. I mean, again, the mind is a funny thing. You know what I mean? And that’s why this experience, it brings out these pitfalls and these traps, these psychological traps that a person might fall into. And again, you can use those for other areas of life knowing, “Oh yeah, that’s just my mind sending me in the wrong direction again. And maybe not being on my side totally.” Or that might be not the right way to put it, not on my side, but I can’t let it lead. The mind is, it’s a valuable tool, but it’s not the boss. I have to be the boss in this whole position. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to go spiritual with the thing, but there’s a little bit of that there. There’s a little bit of the separation between the mind and who you really are that really clicked as far as the way that I looked at it. You know what I mean? The mind will tell me all kinds of fibs about the dangers of not sleeping, and this and that, and it’ll send me to dark places. But it’s up to me to shift my focus and my attention and go, “No, no, no, no, no, no, I’m not going to play that game.” You know what I mean? “I’m in charge. If I sleep four hours tonight, I sleep four hours. I’m still going to do what I’m going to do tomorrow. I’m going to get up, I’m going to go to work, I’m going to go to the gym. I’m going to spend some time outside. I’m going to do the things that I need to do, regardless.” And then you keep just pounding at it like that. Yeah, that’s for me. It was, again, it’s a bit of a, maybe spiritual is too strong, but it’s something there like that that was part of my process. Martin Reed: I think what it comes down to is the fact that we can’t really choose the thoughts, the feelings and the emotions that our brain generates. It’s just going to do that, is completely out of our control. But we can choose how to react. I think sometimes it’s helpful to just, when the brain generates something, to just take a step back to listen, and then decide how we’re going to respond. Is that useful information? If the brain says something like, “If you don’t fall asleep in the next 10 minutes, tomorrow’s going to be ruined. You’re going to lose your job, you’re going to miss your mortgage payments, you’re going to be homeless.” We can just, that’s overwhelming. That just is naturally going to generate a lot of fear, a lot of worry, and a lot of anxiety. But what if we can just take a step back, maybe just take a breath, just acknowledge, “All right, the brain’s saying this because it’s trying to look out for us at the end of the day, but it’s just trying so hard to look out for us. It’s generating a lot of stuff that doesn’t make us feel good.” But it’s heart is in the right place. It’s trying to look out for us. So what if now we can just take a step back, “Okay, how helpful is this? Is there anything I can do in response?” Well, when it comes to falling asleep, no, because the more pressure we put on ourselves to fall asleep, the more difficult it is to fall asleep. How about we just take a step back and just be like, “All right, thanks, Brain. I realize you’re looking out for me. You’ve told me that if I don’t fall asleep in the next half an hour I’m going to lose my job. I’m going to lose my house. I’m going to be homeless. I appreciate that you’re saying that because you’re looking out for me, but now I’m just going to do something else instead.” And if we get all these difficult thoughts and feelings during the day, again, we can just take a step back, acknowledge them, the brain’s doing this for all the right reasons. Acknowledge what we are feeling, acknowledge what we’re thinking, and then decide, “Is there anything useful here that we can use right now?” If there is, great. If there’s not. “All right, thanks, Brain. I appreciate your suggestion. Now I’m just going to redirect my attention onto where I am, what I’m doing, all the things that I can control.” Because really, even when we’re in this big whirlpool of really difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions, we can still, at a basic level we can still move our bodies. We can still engage in actions, no matter how small, that just help us keep living the kind of life we want to live. Those actions might not feel as good right now when we’re caught in all those difficult thoughts and feelings. But we can still do things. We can still move our bodies. And it’s definitely more difficult and we might not get the same level of enjoyment, but that’s really all we can do. Because that’s the only thing we have control over. We don’t have control over any of the stuff that’s going on inside of us. We only have control over what we can do, our actions. And I think it can be difficult to get to a place where we realize that, just because we are conditioned pretty much from birth to get rid of difficult thoughts, to get rid of difficult feelings, to get rid of difficult emotions, and to live a life where we’re all happy a 100% of the time. But unfortunately, that’s just not what life is. Life comes with pain and difficulty and struggle. That’s a normal part of life. But we still get to make that choice so we can allow all those difficult thoughts to completely control our behaviors and distract us and push us away from the life we want to live. Or can we still do some things that help us move toward the life we want to live, even when there’s all that difficulty, even when there’s all that challenge and pain and struggle? And I think if we can do that, all those difficult things, they might not disappear. They might still be there and they might still come back, but they might have less of an influence over our lives. And when they have less of an influence over our lives, we tend to become less concerned. They tend to be less powerful. Is that something that you feel may not necessarily completely mirror your own experience, but something you can identify with now you’re able to look back on your own journey? Eddie Vaisman: Yeah. I mean, one of the things we talked about is I like to go to a boxing club, because it’s just, I don’t know, something that I’ve been doing for a long time. I really enjoy boxing, and I remember mentioning to you, “I’m so tired, blah, blah, I don’t think I can go to boxing.” And then you go, “Well, what if you go anyway and just see what happens? What if, just see what happens, it might work out.” And then I go, I would just make excuses of why the sleep should overrun my desire to go to boxing. Well, no, because the sleep thing has to be handled first. Things have to come in a certain order, and I have to handle this sleep thing first before I start living, whatever that means for somebody. And that was definitely another hangup for me. I thought the sleep thing was something that had to be as solid as can be before I started to move forward with these other things. And that’s something, again, that you brought to the table. It’s like, “Well, don’t you just try these other things and just see how they go, regardless of what step you are in the sleep journey right now.” And I started doing more of that. And even on really bad nights, I realized that, “Hey, I can always still go for a walk. I can always still do things outside. I can always do something.” And again, that commitment to doing something every day, regardless was key for me. I made a list every morning of the things that I hoped to get through that day, and I made that list, regardless of what happened the night before. And that list wouldn’t change. And now I can say those things and I sound like I’m a tough guy or something, but I wasn’t. That came through a lot of pain and trial and discomfort and stuff like that, that commitment to always make that list, “These are the things I’m going to do today. I’m going to get this form of exercise today. I’m going to walk, I’m going to get this done at work and blah, blah.” And just so the commitment to go on with life and what that looks like for each individual is different. But for me it was making the list every morning of the things that I was going to get through. And so just like that chipping away at it, having good sleep habits, not letting it get in the way of my life, not letting it mess with me psychologically. Making sure I wasn’t telling myself things that were making the situation worse. Like, “Well, this is going to be the end of you,” or I don’t know, whatever it happens to be, you know what I mean? And so it’s kind of like you have to be on all points. You have to, at the beginning you have to monitor multiple things. Well, where am I letting this slip into my life in a way that’s not productive? And let’s find all of those things and let’s change those. It might sound like a tall order, but it’s worth it, and it’s something that, I don’t know, that was my way to do it. I had to battle it on multiple fronts. But the first and foremost was having the good sleep habits, that made a huge difference. The commitment to have good sleep habits, and then just tackling it on multiple angles. Martin Reed: And I like how you touched upon, this might sound like I’m some kind of superhero, but it is difficult. It’s really hard, especially when we’re having successions of difficult nights and difficult night after difficult night after night, to then have that motivation to actually do things. Our brain is just screaming at us, “Let’s just lie on the couch. Let’s just rest and conserve energy today.” But it doesn’t usually help us feel much better, especially if we’re going to be spending all that time doing nothing, instead of doing something that’s maybe a little bit more closely aligned with our values and just is a little bit more closely aligned to the life you want to live. But it’s not an easy process. It does take commitment, and I think that is the key word that you used as well. We have to commit to taking some actions. They don’t have to always be huge. They can just be really small, but just some actions that help us engage in things that are important to us during the day, and to commit to actions that just help set the stage for sleep. For example, I’m not going to go to bed tonight until I feel a strong sense of sleepiness, or I’m going to make sure I get out of bed in the morning around the same time each day, no matter what. Because without that consistent out of of bed time, it’s hard to enjoy a consistent sleep and wakefulness cycle. But yeah, I think it’s important to emphasize that it is difficult and it does take commitment. I think it’s really helpful that you stress that in our discussion. Eddie Vaisman: Yeah, let me just make one more point about that. And that’s, it forced me to look at my life and take a step back and really think about, “Well, are you really doing the things in life that you really want to do? Are you really, why does this thing play such a big role in your life?” And I really had to answer some difficult questions about myself. So again, it worked as a catalyst to look at myself and take responsibility for not just for how I was sleeping, but for life in general. I expanded that to be able to go, “Well, it’s time to, well, you have your ideal version of how you sleep. I might have my ideal version of what that looks like. I don’t know. Maybe it’s seven hours a night between this and this hour. Okay, cool. Are you doing everything to support that? Okay, yeah, you are. Okay, cool.” Now, you can expand. “Okay, this is what I did.” I expanded on. I go, “Well, if I have my ideal version of that, I have some kind of an ideal version of life as well and how I want to live. Are you checking all those boxes as well? Are you handling all of that stuff like the sleep thing?” “Well, no.” “Oh, okay, so we got things to talk about.” And so that’s how I use that to expand to other areas and really look in the mirror and go, “Okay, let’s become an adult. Let’s handle some of this stuff.” That was me. It led me down a path of really looking at myself and where I was going and if I was happy and if I was doing everything that it took to get to that. And so just wanted to throw that in because that was important for me as well. Martin Reed: That is really powerful. And I think what does it all come down to? The reason why we don’t want to have insomnia is because we see it as something that’s going to stop us from living the kind of life we want to live. It’s going to make us feel uncomfortable. It’s going to generate difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions, and this is going to prevent us from living the life we want to live. I think that’s what it comes down to. And what we can do is start doing things that help us live the life we want to live, even when that insomnia is still present. So, we’re not waiting for the insomnia to go away before we start doing what we really want to do. We just start doing that stuff that’s important to us now, even when the insomnia is still here. And maybe that then puts insomnia down the list of priorities that our brain thinks of as a big concern, as something that has to be fixed, that it has to put all this energy and effort into that. We have to be engaged in that battle, because if something exists, it doesn’t feel good. But if at the same time we’re doing all this other stuff that we have control over, that’s important to us, that’s meaningful to us, then all this stuff, it might still be there, but it’s just way down on the pecking order now. It’s way less influential, has way less of a difficult effect and an influence on us, and we can just free up all of that energy onto all that stuff we can control. And that has a really direct influence on the kind of life we want to live. Eddie Vaisman: Right? Because if it has, if it’s so high on the pyramid of wellbeing, if we put it at such a high place, what are we putting at a lower place that maybe should be more up there? What are we ignoring? If we’re focusing on that, we’re probably ignoring something else. And what are those things? And let’s work on that as well. It can be, and yeah, in a way it can be very, I don’t know. It can be cathartic in that experience of it. It definitely was for me. And I still have occasional bad nights. I had a bad night last Wednesday or Thursday night or something like that. I got home late from work, and I just couldn’t knock out at my normal time, blah, blah, blah. I just couldn’t get sleepy. I got into bed. I wasn’t sleepy, but I got into bed because it was usually when I go to sleep, which is not ideal. And I was just up and I couldn’t knock out and stuff like that. And then I only slept maybe three or four hours, but I got up the next day and I went to the gym I normally do before work, and I went to work and I did my normal day. And I was tired and I was fatigued and stuff like that. But the next night I slept better and it was just only one bad night. Whereas in the past one bad night could have snowballed into who knows what length of trauma. But now it’s like, yeah, you just developed a different level of confidence and commitment to it. And again, expect that type of stuff. It’s like one time I went snowboarding, and that’s very taxing, and I didn’t sleep good after snowboarding. I said, “If I can not sleep good after snowboarding, it’s like I could not sleep good after, no matter what occurrence.” I mean, because that is, I mean, that’s tiring. That’s exhausting. That’s long, tough days, I mean, skiing and snowboarding.” And then I thought other occurrences were I would get in bed and then now not worry about how I was going to sleep or anything like that and just fall asleep like a baby. So, it’s really about where your mind is with the thing. So yeah, it just has to commit to getting better, and anybody can get better. I wouldn’t have believed that before, but now I strongly believe it. Again, I think the most important part, for me, what was most key is being okay with this unfortunate, whatever you want to call it, circumstance. So making peace with it. Getting to a place where I was at peace with the situation that I was in, accepting it for what it was, and then moving forward out of that situation. Instead of staying in a negative mindset of, “No, this shouldn’t be happening.” Or frustration, or “Why is this?” Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter what led me here. Doesn’t matter. It’s time to move forward. And then figuring out what that means for each person. Again, I’ll say it again with the sleep restriction, that was really key for me, that did a lot of the work. And I still use it, as a matter of fact. I’m very disciplined about my sleep. I don’t let it go all over the place. I handle it as if I was handling food, I’m very good about my food, what I eat, what I put in my body. I’m very good about sleep as well too. I’m very good about, “Oh, okay, handle it in the most mature responsible way and it pays off.” And to me that’s worth it because I feel so good during the day and I never get tired, and I just have a ton of energy. So for me that’s worth it. Maybe some people would say, “Oh, but I want to sleep in more. I want to go to bed earlier.” Okay, cool. For me those things are never worth the consistent sleep that I get on a night nightly basis now that I’ve refined it and really dialed it in. Yeah, that’s key for me, just that. Martin Reed: That’s great. Well, Eddie, I really appreciate all the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and talk about your experience. But there’s just one last question that I’d like to ask you, because I ask every single guest, and it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Eddie Vaisman: Well, I would direct them to you. Because for me, I needed a coach. I needed somebody on my team that I could ask questions to, that I could nag when I wasn’t feeling up to myself, when I wasn’t … Somebody that I could, I just needed that handholding, for me. Maybe some people don’t need that, but that made a huge difference. Because then I could talk to you about the ups and downs and I could lean on you when I had to. So, that’s a no-brainer. I would definitely, that would be what I would do. Martin Reed: All right. Well, I appreciate that, Eddie, and I really appreciate your time coming on and sharing your story. It’s going to help a lot of people, so thank you so much. Eddie Vaisman: Good. Thank you as well. My pleasure. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Jeannette thought of herself as a great sleeper until 13 years ago when she moved and her work schedule become less consistent. She started to stay up later and sleep in later and this led to some sleep disruption. When Jeannette tried to fix this, she ended up going down the insomnia rabbit hole and started researching how to get rid of her insomnia. The more research she did, the more she tried to fix her sleep, the more rules and rituals she engaged in, and the more she found herself struggling. After working with me, Jeannette’s sleep improved — but one night she woke up and found that she couldn’t fall back to sleep and all her old fears returned. She felt that something must be wrong with her as she found herself waking and finding it impossible to fall back to sleep night after night. This pulled Jeannette back into her old safety behaviors that she knew from experience weren’t helpful because she just didn’t know what else to do. In this episode, Jeannette describes how she moved away from the insomnia struggle; how she became more comfortable with nighttime wakefulness, how she stopped chasing after sleep, how she started to allow her mind to generate whatever thoughts it chose to generate — even the difficult ones, and how she started to be kinder to herself when things were difficult. Perhaps most importantly of all, Jeannette’s story shows that ups and downs are normal and to be expected. Just as we will have difficult days from time to time, we will have difficult nights from time to time. What truly matters is how we respond. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay. Jeanette, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Jeannette Stojcevski: You’re welcome. Glad to be here. Martin Reed: I’m really looking forward to our conversation, so let’s just get started. I’d like to start right at the beginning. So can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think may have caused those initial issues with sleep? Jeannette Stojcevski: Yeah, so my sleep problems, I never had problems sleeping in my teens, my 20s. I was a great sleeper, a really great sleeper. I brag about it. I needed to get my eight, nine hours. So I was always a little obsessive about it, but I was a great sleeper. And then right about 13 years ago, I was living in LA and I’m a personal trainer, so my job was pretty consistent as far as the schedule. But around 30, I moved to Hollywood. I wanted a change, I moved to a little city outside of Hollywood that I liked. And I commuted to work three days a week. And on the other two days, Tuesdays and Thursdays, I worked from home, like an online job that kept me pretty busy, but I could start it at whatever time I wanted. So my insomnia started right around this time because looking back, I had a schedule when I was personal training before I had moved. And then when I had gotten this online job, on those days, I would sleep in and I would generally go out maybe the night before and not know why I was having trouble waking up at, because I had early clients. So on the other days, I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning and I could no longer fall asleep on the nights before. And it was just because I believe my schedule was completely erratic. So some days I was waking up at 4:00 AM, other days 10:00 AM, 8:00. So then my sleep just started to struggle from that point on, and I didn’t know why. I just thought, “Oh my gosh, what was going on with me? Why can’t I fall asleep anymore?” And that’s when the search started. That’s when I just started down the rabbit hole and it never stopped. Martin Reed: So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about that? Because whenever we are faced with a problem as human beings, we want to fix that problem, right? Jeannette Stojcevski: Yes. Martin Reed: But sleep is one of these outliers that tends not to respond well to effort, which we all know once we’ve gone through that journey and come out the other side. But when we are really trapped in that struggle, boy, we’ll do anything to get out of it. And that usually involves lots of experiments, lots of rituals, lots of efforts. So yeah, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your experience there. Jeannette Stojcevski: Sure. So just like so many other people, I immediately started researching, started going to the internet looking for things I could try. So it started with just the sleep hygiene. Keeping my room cold or blackout curtains, eye mask. I developed a lot of rituals. Then I started to do acupuncture. I’m living in LA, so there’s a plethora of holistic doctors. So I just started seeing just random healers, people that told me that something in my past life was contributing to the problem. I wrote all of them down. I did hypnosis, I spent a lot of money on hypnosis. I bought a machine, it’s called… I just tried so many crazy things. This thing that you put around your head, it’s called tDCS, some sort of stimulation for your brain, which I think can be actually dangerous. I tried sweat lodges, everything I could think of, crystals. And then I started taking sleeping pills. That’s when I went down the path of, “Okay, I don’t know what else to do.” I started smoking marijuana and I started taking sleeping pills. But I had no idea what I was actually taking. I got them from a family member who was able to get them from Europe, and I did not know, and he didn’t know what I was taking either. So I eventually ran out because it wasn’t a prescription. So I eventually ran out, and now I’m dealing with, which I didn’t realize at the time how dangerous it was, I’m dealing with rebound insomnia. So it was even worse at that point where I didn’t sleep for days. I actually slept in my car one night. So I can’t even be in my apartment anymore, I’ve got to leave. So I went to my car and actually fell asleep that night, which was interesting. And so after about five days of that, I stayed at a friend’s house and then I was able to sleep after that. I was able to get a good chunk of five, six hours. So I knew that I could sleep again, I knew my body was able to do this, but I still didn’t know why it was happening, so I sought out the help of a holistic doctor out there. And it was a wonderful experience, I started to sleep better, but I thought at that time it was because of the supplements. I thought, “Wow, I’m on this program, he balanced out whatever was going on with me, I’m good.” But in reality, looking back, I think my sleep got better at that time because I just started to, because I didn’t go out anymore, I wasn’t going out at night, so I wasn’t sleeping in as much. So I think everything regulated and I started sleeping better for a while. And then it never really left me. I was always worried about it, I always thought about it, I obsessed about the way I looked like, “Is this affecting my appearance, is this affecting my workouts?” I just continue to worry about it, so that fear never left me. And then in December of 2020… Now I’m living in Michigan. I moved back to Michigan and I got COVID in December of 2020. And I got it pretty… I lost my smell, and so it was a pretty difficult time. I got a little depressed around that time. And my sleep suffered naturally, but of course… And I was having problems every so often before that. But it really, really suffered after I got COVID and I thought, “Oh no, this is different. This is the worst it’s ever been.” And that’s when I started working with you and I got better. But then I think it was September of 2021 that I just started to get worse. I don’t know what the trigger was, it was just a night where I couldn’t fall back to sleep. That’s what it was. I woke up around three in the morning and then I couldn’t fall back to sleep after that. And then I was like, “Oh no, it is back.” But that’s never happened to me, usually I can get back to sleep. So I’m thinking it was worse than it has ever been, something must be wrong with me. And then I started going down another crazy rabbit hole. I considered going to a rehab at that time like, “Do I need to go somewhere where somebody just has to take care of me for a while?” I considered going to the ER psych ward. I was just out of my mind thinking something was really wrong with me because of course, the following night it happened. And then I’m waking up and unable to go back to sleep every night of the week. So instead of going back to what I knew I should do, which is just stay calm, it usually passes, I just went down another rabbit hole where I started smoking marijuana again, I started looking for the supplements, and I started just doing the things that I knew weren’t going to work, but for some reason I just didn’t know what else to do at that moment because I just felt so bad. And I think the reason why it was hard for me to go back on the program was because at that time I just felt so physically bad. But then that’s when I think I reached out to you or you reached out to me and I just decided, “Okay, I’m going to do this again. I’m really just going to give this a real shot again.” And I did. And of course my sleep started improving, I started to be able to fall back asleep again. And there was an interview you did that really inspired me. I’m a big watcher of your podcast with other people because that’s really what fueled me during those dark moments. Just knowing that, I think there was a lady who had it pretty much her whole life, and she said something and it stuck with me, “There’s things going on behind the scenes.” It feels like it may not be working at first but I remember I just kept saying that to myself, “Behind the scenes, Jeannette. It’s going to work. This takes time, this takes a minute. You’ve had this and you’ve had some deep psychological changes around your thoughts around sleep, so this is not going to be an overnight thing.” And I always thought, “Oh, by the third day, I should be sleeping better.” And that’s not the case. For me at least, it wasn’t. So I just started to stick to the program better too, because before the problem I think I had was I just couldn’t stick to it. I just had a really hard time getting out of bed. Yeah, but when I finally just committed and I just dived into the podcast and videos and it helped me so much on this last round of my last relapse. Martin Reed: Yeah, there’s so much great stuff there to just unpack because I think a lot of people will recognize that journey that you just described. Insomnia from person to person, it is pretty much identical. We have a trigger for sleep disruption. Sometimes it’s really memorable and obvious, but sometimes not. So we experience that sleep disruption. Normally, a lot of the time we don’t think much of it, but if it sticks around for longer than it might have done in the past, then that triggers the worry, the stress, the anxiety, or the research. Again, completely normal reaction. We have a problem, we want to fix it. So we then really what it comes down to, we engage in effort. We try harder to sleep than we ever have before, we put all this effort into sleep, we might engage in rituals, experiments. Again, all completely understandable why we do that. But it actually ends up giving insomnia the oxygen it needs to survive, that attention, that effort, that strong desire to avoid being awake at night. That’s what keeps insomnia going. And just as you experienced, some of this stuff can give a short-term relief. It can generate some improvements in the short term, but what can happen is when we then try and move away from those things, we are back to where we started because we never really got to that root issue, which is addressing that really strong desire to avoid being awake. I think what it comes down to is if we are willing, if we can get to a place where we are more willing for insomnia to exist, it tends not to exist, but when we are really desperate for it not to exist, it’s really likely to exist. So all of that, and it’s like, it’s also important to recognize too, that the worry and the anxiety, and the stress, and all those difficult thoughts and feelings, they’re not necessarily a cause of insomnia. Just because we’re stressed or anxious or worried, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to have a really difficult night. But when we start to struggle with that, when we try and push or fight or avoid all that difficult stuff, all those thoughts and emotions, I think that’s what then definitely can generate some difficult nights. Jeannette Stojcevski: Yeah, absolutely. Martin Reed: And again, it’s our human nature. We don’t like feeling anxious or worried or stressed, so we want to try and push that stuff away. But just like sleep, we can’t control what goes on inside our minds. And the more we try, the more we get tangled up in this endless struggle. And I don’t need to tell you, and I don’t need to tell anyone listening, that struggle is so exhausting, and we tend not to make that much progress. Jeannette Stojcevski: Yeah, it is exhausting. And I think that was my struggle, just the struggle of not wanting to be awake. It’s still a little bit difficult. I’ve definitely improved so much, but in the beginning, I just was really uncomfortable with getting out of bed. I didn’t like the idea that I was awake during the night, I was always trying to catch up on sleep, catch sleep, laying there with my eyes closed, just hoping it’ll come. So I was very, very uncomfortable with the fact that I had insomnia and that this was my life for right now, or I just wasn’t comfortable with that. So that part was very hard for me to do, get out of bed and just accept the fact that I’m up and stay calm about it. I would, just like so many other people have experienced, go into sweats, and just be hot, and anxious, and just be tossing and turning and every which way. But for some reason, I just couldn’t muster up the strength to get myself out of bed. Or if I did, I would, it would just be to go to the bathroom and then right back into the bed, or just a temporary quick break out of my bed. I would sit up and then get back into it because I was just like, “I don’t want to be off. It’s night.” But now I know looking back, that just fueled my issue. It just fueled it. There’s no reason to have a reaction like that unless you just… It’s a habit, it just became a habit for me that I was unable to break. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think then when we are engaged in that struggle, it’s so easy to fall back into all those old safety behaviors. Again, just like you mentioned, when we found short-term relief from something, whatever it is, when we are struggling again, it’s so easy to reach back for those things again, to try. What are we doing? We’re just engaging in that effort again, which again is understandable because we don’t like what we’re going through. It’s all that effort, although all that trying to avoid the wakefulness, all that trying to make sleep happen, really is what causes all the struggle. And really, if we just take a step back and just think, “What is insomnia?” It basically comes down to we don’t want to be awake at night, so we put all this effort into trying to make sleep happen. The brain detects us engaged in all these efforts. So what does the brain think? “Oh, you’re trying so hard to avoid being awake at night. Being awake at night, it must be a danger, it must be this threat. It’s like a very real physical threat and a danger to you, so I’m going to be alert to protect you from this danger of wakefulness.” And obviously that alertness makes sleep more difficult. So all those efforts that we engage in, they can give us some short-term relief sometimes, but what are we doing? We’re kind of reinforcing that belief in our brain that this wakefulness is a real danger, that it has to be alert to protect us from, because the brain isn’t doing all this stuff to make us feel bad. It’s doing all this stuff to look out for us, but it’s just trying so hard that it often ends up getting in the way. Jeannette Stojcevski: I know. I didn’t understand that until recently, that whole concept, like how the brain is trying to protect you from this. I just didn’t understand that, but it definitely made sense the more I started to think about it, I’m like, “Yeah, that’s definitely what’s going on.” I can definitely understand that. Martin Reed: Yeah. And so because the brain is trying to look out for us and it’s sending us all these warnings which tend not to feel good, like worry, and anxiety, and fear, and stress, and all that stuff. Because they don’t feel good, we normally want to kind of ignore it or push it away or pretend it’s not happening, or try and distract ourselves. But then the brain thinks, “Okay, there’s this danger. Now I’m trying to tell you about it, and now you’re ignoring me?” So the brain then freaks out even more and it’s like, it has to yell even louder, right? Jeannette Stojcevski: Yes. Martin Reed: It’s like if we see someone about to cross the street and there’s a truck coming towards, and when we yell at them, “There’s a truck coming, don’t cross the street,” and they just kind of wave at us and carry on going, what are we going to do? We’re going to yell even louder, right? Jeannette Stojcevski: Yes. Martin Reed: And louder, and louder, and louder. So I think what can be so helpful is just acknowledging all that difficult stuff that the brain is generating rather than as we’re all hardwired to do, trying to push it away or fight or avoid it, just acknowledging it. Just even something as simple as just being like, “I recognize that I’m feeling anxious right now. I’m feeling worried, I’m feeling scared.” And just acknowledging that you’re feeling that can just be one of those things that lifts a little bit of that weight off your shoulders because now you are not trying to deny it, you’re not trying to push it away. Unlike a beach ball, the more you push it away, the more it pushes back. You’re just acknowledging it. And then if you continue practicing this, you might be able to get to a point where you allow that stuff to exist, even though it doesn’t feel good, you just let it kind of sit there and make a little bit of space for it. Maybe it will just hang out for a while, maybe then it will go away, maybe then it will come back. But we’re just not engaged in that struggle anymore, we’re not trying to push it. We’re not trying to push it away, we’re not trying to distract ourselves, which is so exhausting. We just let the mind do what the mind wants to do and focus on what we have control over, which are always our behaviors. No matter how bad things are, no matter how difficult they are, we can still move our body. We can do things that can make unpleasant wakefulness a bit more pleasant, and we can do things during the day, these don’t have to be huge things, but we can always do some things during the day that are aligned with our values and that just help us keep moving toward the kind of life we want to live, even when all this stuff is going on in our heads, even after we’ve had a difficult night. And if we do that, not only does it help give us the opportunity to make the days and the nights a little bit better, but it also helps train the brain that maybe this wakefulness isn’t quite as much of a threat. Certainly not a physical threat, like a bear waiting for you under the covers because you’re making that wakefulness a little bit more pleasant by just doing something else instead of struggling. And then during the day, you’re still able to do some things that help you live the kind of life you want to live. And I think that’s all part of the journey that we have to go through in order to enjoy this long-term improvement where we just see that insomnia more in the rear-view mirror than something that’s controlling our lives. Jeannette Stojcevski: Yes, I agree. What also helped me in regards to just allowing the thoughts to come in it. I think I mentioned in the email I was trying a little bit of, during my relapse, I read about Acceptance Commitment Therapy, ACT. And I thought, “Okay, I’m just…” It really made sense to me, like letting the thoughts come in and come out and being mindful. But I also think that it led to a little bit more of a struggle for me because I thought, “You know what? I’m just going to lay here in bed instead of get up, because that’s what normal sleepers do.” And it didn’t work for me. I liked the concept of being mindful and letting the thoughts come and just letting them come in, but I needed the structure of the sleep window, a real sleep window. I liked the discipline of that. For me, that was very important. So both together, I think combined helped me. And I think just letting go of the sleep window was probably a really bad thing for me that I was starting to let go of it, because I would spend long periods of time in bed too, I forgot to mention that. And I was that person nine, 10 hours, just sleep in till whenever. And I wasn’t even sleeping, just to catch up, but that didn’t help. So the structure really helps me. Structure. Martin Reed: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit more about the kind of changes that you made when we were working together or after, because it was a while ago that we were actually working together, so there’s been a lot that’s happened in the intervening period. And one of the first changes that we talked about was what are your thoughts on spending a little bit less time in bed? Because the temptation always tends to be, “I really want sleep to happen, so if I spend more time in bed I’m giving myself the opportunity for sleep to happen.” But often this can kind of backfire on us and just lead to more time awake at night, which is one of the things that we recognize as being an unpleasant part of having insomnia. So how about you tell us a little bit more about your experience there. You already mentioned that you were spending a lot of time in bed. How did you reduce that? Why did you reduce it? And how did you find that experience? Jeannette Stojcevski: That was a very difficult part of the program for me, just reducing the time in bed. So normally I wasn’t affected by the going to sleep time. I know a lot of people are like, “Oh, I had to stay up until one.” That was not a problem for me because I like the night, I’m a little bit of a night owl. So my sleep window wasn’t incredibly late, started at about midnight, 12:30. But because I was spending so much time in bed, I don’t work mornings and I have structured my life that way, that’s one way insomnia has affected my life, it’s like no more morning activities. Instead of nighttime activities, for me, it’s morning. So I was going from a 12:00 to 9:00, 10:00 AM window to a shorter window. And even seven hours seemed pretty scary to me. I know some people start out with even less. So mine was like seven hours, 7:15. And it was very scary and I was unable to follow it for a while. So I would some days, and then if I had a bad night the next day I would sleep through my sleep window maybe over an hour. And then I would just beat myself up. In the beginning when I was working with you, I would beat myself up and just be so critical of myself like, “Yeah, you can’t do this. You’re a trainer and you’re telling other people to do things.” But it also gave me compassion for myself and for my clients because I know what they’re going through in a way. Even though I don’t have weight issues, I have this issue that’s so hard, it was so, so hard for me to stick to the program. So I have so much more compassion now for my clients, which has been great. But the sleep window was definitely very challenging. And you recommended something that was very helpful. And when I would hear like, “Oh, you have to get up and get out of bed 7:00 AM.” That was daunting. I feel like a zombie. Sometimes I actually feel sick from lack of sleep. But then you said, “You don’t have to make it this event. You don’t have to get up and do a five-mile run. You can get up and sit on the cozy couch with your blanket, with your cup of coffee or whatever, and start your morning out that way.” So that’s what I started to do. I remembered that. So just started to pull myself out of bed, not beat myself up if I slept in a little bit, 30 minutes, that’s okay. I would just get myself up. And I did what you mentioned, just start my day really slow. And slowly but surely I started to feel better in the morning, because I had a lot of nausea in the morning, whether it was from actual lack of sleep or I think it was more of my reaction to it. Of course, we all feel a little not so well after a poor night of sleep, but the way I felt was just I wasn’t able to eat sometimes, but that started to get a little bit better. And then I actually just started just jotting. I wanted to let go of the charting. I didn’t like that because I don’t think that was helpful for me because I’m already a little bit of an obsessive person, but I would journal about just how I felt that day and the little improvements I was making. Like, “Oh, today I didn’t feel like… I was able to eat within an hour of waking up. That’s an improvement.” So I just started thinking about, instead of looking at all these negative things that were going on, I just started tracking my improvements. What has improved today and what have I continued to do during even some of the bad times? And nothing in my life really fell apart, so I think that was really helpful, just slow start to the morning, have just journaling my successes, because somebody else, I think this was another person, because I had spoke to many, many people over the years, that was just a snippet. Like over the 13 years I had it, I saw quite a few sleep doctors and somebody recommended, “Oh, maybe you should schedule an exercise class in the morning, some things like maybe yoga or something.” I’m like, “That sounds horrible for me to get out the door. I mean, even if it’s yoga, that sounds horrible. So no.” And of course, I never took the yoga class in the morning because that just wasn’t going to work for me. And so this suggestion really helped and I still do it that way, not get up. And I never really was, even as an athlete in college, we had 6:00 AM practices. I was never, “Oh, I can’t wait to get off.” I was just slow as molasses in the morning, but my roommate loved mornings. So we’re all wired differently. It’s so interesting. But yeah, I’m still slow in the morning and that’s okay for me. Martin Reed: Well, I think I’m the founding member of that club. I’m the slowest person in the morning. I’m terrible. So it’s just how we’re wired. Some of us are wired like that. And I think that’s another one of those traps that we can easily fall into as well when we’re struggling with sleep is when we wake up and we are feeling kind of lethargic and groggy, we can assume that that’s a complete reflection of how we slept. If I feel pretty groggy and pretty out of it, then that must be because I had a really difficult night. And it definitely could be, but I know from my own experience, and it sounds from your own experience that a lot of us, we just feel crappy in the morning no matter what. And what can just be so helpful is just getting up, just getting the day started, even if we started really slowly, just getting it started, just getting life going that day. And often we start to feel differently as the day progresses in response to the time, what we’re doing, where we are, and stuff like that. I mean, I like to think that when I first wake in the morning, that’s the low point of the day, that’s the crappies I’m going to feel all day long most of the time, so I’ve got a big improvement to look forward to as the day progresses. And I think that’s where just getting out of bed around the same time every day can be helpful because often just lingering in the bed doesn’t usually help shake off all those difficult, that fatigue, that grogginess, but kind of moving, getting the day started no matter how slowly, often can be more helpful. And it’s another one of those things too, where we are not chasing off to sleep because we are getting out of bed around the same time. And we don’t have to be super strict. Like you said, maybe one day we fancy like an hour lying or a half an hour lying. That’s fine, we’re human beings. But just getting out of bed around the same time, we are not chasing off to sleep, we are not saying to the brain, “Look, I got to get sleep, I’ve got to get sleep because being awake is a real danger. You need to protect me from this danger, be really alert at night to protect me from being awake, we’ve got to get sleep.” And when we’re out of bed, we tend to be moving around, engage. We are more likely to be engaged and doing the kind of stuff that’s important to us. And that’s really what life comes down to. Life comes with pain, and struggle, and difficulty. Life is what we do when we’re awake. It’s all the actions that we are engaged in. So as long as we can just continue to do things that are aligned with our values, that are important and meaningful to us, even with all that difficult stuff going on, that’s really all that matters. In a hundred years, we are not going to look back on all the great nights of sleep we had. We’re going to be looking back on all the things we did when we were awake, even when we felt crappy doing them. Jeannette Stojcevski: Yes, absolutely. Martin Reed: Just the fact that we were doing them, I think that’s really important. Jeannette Stojcevski: Yes, it is. And I think it’s so easy to forget when you’re going through a long bout of insomnia or a short bout of insomnia, we forget that, and I think a lot of insomniacs tend to be perfectionists and they want everything perfect all the time. And for me, I know that I got into this mindset that I had to feel perfect all the time. And I forgot how I used to, like when I was a teenager, of course there was nights when I didn’t sleep, but then I was always waking up at the same time every day to go to school. And I think that’s why I just kept that good sleep pattern. And even in college, I think back, I was living in Chicago, I was tired all the time just being from being an athlete. We weren’t practicing twice a day, school, I worked. I remember just falling asleep sometimes on the train on the L, and I would end up at a different stop completely outside of my dorm because I was just so tired. But I didn’t think about it, I didn’t sweat it, I wasn’t freaking out about it. It’s just life comes with lots of ups and downs. So yeah, I think when you’re in the crux of it, you just think, “This is not how I should feel.” And in reality, yeah, there’s going to be some days that won’t be so great, but really what are you doing during the day? Are you having joyful moments? And really, most of the time, like you just said, the mornings are the worst times of my day. But even on those nights I only slept a couple hours, by the evening time I’m tired, but I’m actually feeling okay. And I would always remember that, I reminded myself of that on those bad mornings like, “Jeannette, by seven o’clock tonight, you’re going to be feeling fine. Just let’s get through this day, stay calm, stay relaxed. Yeah, it’ll be okay.” So it’s just so crazy how we just can forget and want to just have this perfect little sleep in life and it doesn’t exist. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think it’s really important to recognize like you just said, just to look back on all the important stuff we’ve done in our life. Probably none of those things happened without any kind of pain or struggle or difficulty because that’s what life is. Life comes with all that difficult stuff along with the good stuff. And it’s hard to achieve the good stuff without also experiencing the difficult stuff. So for example, if we’re studying, if we go to college, or maybe we’re still at high school and we are doing all that study and we’re feeling exhausted by it, that struggle. If we are training to be an athlete, you’re putting your body through all of that training, you’re feeling fatigued, but you recognize that in order to reach the level you want to reach to live the kind of life you want to live to reach your goals, there’s going to be that fatigue. It’s not all going to be plain saying. There’s going to be difficulty, there’s going to be struggle. And if you’re training for a marathon, I’m sure you’re going to be getting blisters, maybe some pulled muscles. There’s going to be pain. Jeannette Stojcevski: Yeah. Martin Reed: Right? There’s going to be pain in order to reach what you want to reach. For us to live a life that’s aligned with our values, pain comes with it, but that pain is necessary to serve our values, to help us live that life that we want to live. And I think it can be helpful to just recognize that because it’s so easy to fall into that trap and just wanting to feel good all of the time, to want to have the best night of sleep every single night, but that just doesn’t happen. And I think opening ourselves up to be more willing to accept or to just experience the difficult nights, to experience difficult feelings, to experience difficult emotions and thoughts, just opening ourselves up to allowing that to happen and realizing that that stuff can all happen at the same time as we are doing what matters. We are doing stuff that helps us live the kind of life we want to live. I think that can be really important to just reflect on and to recognize. Jeannette Stojcevski: I agree. Absolutely. Martin Reed: So we talked about the sleep window, we’ve talked quite a lot about everything that goes on in the mind when we’re going through this. You also touched upon how to respond when you’re struggling during the night. And for you, it sounds like you found it helpful to practice getting out of bed during the night if it just wasn’t pleasant to be in bed and sleep wasn’t happening. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Jeannette Stojcevski: Sure. Martin Reed: Before you made any changes, were you one of those people that would you stay in bed tossing and turning, trying to make sleep happen? And how did you get to a point where you thought, “Oh, maybe I could change this and do something different instead”? Jeannette Stojcevski: Yeah, I was one of those people who struggled with getting out of bed. I tossed and turned pretty much all night, except for my frequent trips to the bathroom. For some reason that was just, I think, anxiety-driven. I really didn’t have to go, but I would just go to the bathroom, get back in bed, toss and turn more. And then sometimes I would fall asleep, but I never was able to fully commit to just getting out of bed. Then it’s funny because I have a friend who doesn’t sleep well, and it’s sad because he is very stuck in this, I’ve tried everything and he said something, he’s like, “Oh my gosh, my bed, it looks like a mess in the morning. The sheets are off, the bedliners, everything is messed up.” And in my head I was like, “Oh my gosh, I was doing exactly what you’re doing and I know the reason why he’s not getting better.” And then after that conversation with him and then a couple more podcasts or interviews with people, I realized, “Okay, I really need to give this a shot. I think it’s not helping me because I’m ending up with sore, achy muscles anyway.” I really started to get real serious with myself and say, “If you don’t try something, if you don’t do something, this is going to be your life for the rest of your life.” Because I think I was, and I am still, disciplined. This is one area of my life where I feel like I lost discipline. I couldn’t just do this, so I just had some real good talks with myself just like I would before a race or something like, “You know what? This is something you have to do. You can do this, strong.” And it was just a lot of positive self-talk like, “Come on Jeannette, let’s go. Get up, let’s do this.” So for me, it was just realizing that I really had no other choice If I wanted to get better, that laying in bed was not serving me. It was making me more anxious, more irritable, more sore, sweating. I felt like I was having hot flashes. I’m like, “I’m going through perimenopause.” That wasn’t it. It was just anxiety. So just with being able to reason, again, my journaling, I was able to start making those changes in the middle of the night, but I didn’t get up and read a book. That was never something that felt good or I never was one to get up and watch TV. I didn’t want to do anything that was just too much effort for me. So for me, it was just stretching, laying on the ground, getting up. I actually got up, but I would come to my couch and then just sit on my couch or sometimes just listen to a YouTube station that has an image with rain or just something very relaxing, but not in an effort to fall back to sleep, just to stay calm. So I started doing that, just started removing myself from the bed, either stretch or just sit somewhere else, but I wasn’t necessarily doing anything. And that felt good to me, that did feel good to me. And eventually I did have a big fear of my bed for a long time, actually. I slept on this good old couch for a long time. So at that point I was going back to the bed though, and it all started just slowly but surely, but it took time. Again, this is not something that worked for me in five days, it took weeks and weeks, and I feel like haven’t lost the fear completely of getting up in the middle of the night, like I’m still sometimes like, “Okay, I’m up.” But I know I’ll get there, to the point where I no longer even think about it. It’s just a blip and then I go back to sleep. So it is a process. Martin Reed: Yeah, it is. And I think that’s one reason why it’s so easy to fall back into all these old safety behaviors that we know from experience aren’t helpful over the long term, but they tend to give us that short-term relief, whether it’s medication, marijuana, alcohol, or anything, any kind of external thing, because those things promise quick fixes. And maybe in the short term they might help that way, but we just end up kicking the can down the road, we know it’s just going to come back sooner or later. Whereas this stuff, changing our behaviors, the stuff that we can control, it takes practice and it takes time, it takes a lot more effort, a lot more discipline, a lot more commitment. There’s going to be blips along the way, there’s going to be struggle, but I think it is one of the best things we can do if our goal is to do better over the long term, because really like we touched upon earlier, insomnia is just… It exists because of all the effort, all the things we are doing to try and make sleep happen, to try and avoid that wakefulness. If instead we can do the opposite. So for example, with the sleep window allotting less time for sleep, what are we doing? Ultimately, we’re just preventing ourselves from chasing after sleep. So that’s a big sleep effort dropped right there just by giving ourselves an earliest possible bedtime and a consistent out of bedtime in the morning. Now we’re not chasing sleep and the process of getting out of bed during the night, I often get asked, “Isn’t that in itself a sleep effort?” I think it’s the opposite of a sleep effort because if we’re getting out of bed, we’re not going to fall asleep at that moment as the physical act of getting out of bed. Again, what are we doing really? We’re just not chasing sleep, we are not putting effort into sleep. So if we’re in bed and being in bed doesn’t feel good, we are just going to do something that’s going to make being awake more pleasant. So we are not putting all that effort into sleep, we’re not struggling to get entangled up with our thoughts, and our feelings, and our emotions. We’re just going to do something to make being awake more pleasant. And again, not only are we not chasing after sleep, if we are able to do something more pleasant, the brain’s like, “Wait a minute, I thought wakefulness was this physical threat or this danger. How can that be if now this wakefulness is starting to feel a little bit more pleasant than it used to?” And so we chip away at it. And like you said, it’s not something that works within 48 hours or in three days, or necessarily within a week or two. Often it takes a lot of commitment to just avoid falling into that trap of trying to make sleep happen, trying not to think something, trying not to feel something, and just focusing on what we can control. But what we can control won’t necessarily give us immediate relief, but it’s usually more helpful over the long term. Jeannette Stojcevski: I agree, I absolutely agree. I’m a testament to it. Yeah, it takes time. It does. Martin Reed: So before I move on, I did just want to ask you about dealing with those ups and downs, because they always happen, everyone has difficult nights as we live life, but were there any other changes that you made either when we were working together or since then that you found to be helpful that maybe we haven’t discussed or mentioned yet? Jeannette Stojcevski: Another change I made, it wasn’t necessarily a change, but I dived into, and this may not help other people, but it was really important for me to hear other people’s stories and to know that what I was doing was going to help me because for some reason I just had a hard time believing that this was going to work for me, or that after a week if it didn’t work, I would start to lose hope. So I just started adding more information. Again, my brain, I needed to hear it from other people that went through years of insomnia that this helped them. So I started just listening to more of the interviews and I just started to relax even during the day and do more during the day, I dived into workouts again. So before when I didn’t feel that great, I would skip my workout. And that was also a huge thing for me, catastrophize like, “Oh, am I going to lose my job because I’m going to become overweight?” Whatever, it was just horrible thoughts. But then I just started to really just live my life normally, which means doing my workout that I had scheduled, even if it didn’t… Some days it wouldn’t feel as good or I couldn’t lift as heavy or whatnot, but I still committed to that. And I just started living more, going out with people. Even when I felt dead tired, normally I would’ve canceled. I would even cancel a phone call because I just didn’t have the energy like, “Oh, I’m just too tired for it.” And I stopped doing all that stuff. I started living my life more true to how I wanted to live it. And little by little I started journaling that too like, “Well, I did all my workouts this week.” And then I would really reflect on all the new things I started to add to my life, which is just going out to dinners with friends. For me, going out at night, I wasn’t afraid of it because I need to get back home because my bedtime was already pretty late. It was just more, “Do I have the energy to do this? I just feel so crappy or whatever.” And in reality, when I went out with that person, I always felt better, I was able to shake off the fatigue and have a good time. So I think little by little, just living life started to add up for me. And also being mindful of the days. That was something that I picked up too, is just being mindful on those days I wasn’t feeling my best. And also being kinder to myself, I started being kinder. That’s something I did. Whereas I was really abusive before. I would just constantly in my head, “I’m a failure, I can’t do this, why can’t I do this? Other people have done this.” And I just decided to stop it, just be kind on those days. “Okay, so you didn’t wake up on time. All right. So you didn’t have a great night. How do you feel?” I just checked in with myself a little bit more and that was really helpful, that was really helpful for me. Just checking in during the day. I’m just doing more living. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think all of that is so, so important, and especially the thing that we often miss is just to be kind to ourselves, because what we are going through is difficult, and I think we can be really supportive to other people when they’re going through struggle, but when it comes to ourselves, often that all flies out the window and we are really mean to ourselves. Jeannette Stojcevski: Oh yeah. Martin Reed: “I shouldn’t be feeling this way, or I should have done better at that.” But the truth is, we are human beings. We have good times, we have difficult times, and I think it’s helpful to recognize that and to be kind to ourselves. It’s very easy to forget that and I think it does play a really important role in the healing process because if we are just going to be angry at ourselves or disparaging to ourselves because we’re struggling with something, it puts more pressure on us to do better. And often, that thing we’re trying to do better at is something we can’t even control. And yet we’re so hard on ourselves when what happens isn’t aligned with what we want to happen. So yeah, I’m really glad that you mentioned that as something that you found to be helpful, just being kinder to yourself. Jeannette Stojcevski: Yes, it’s so important, it’s monumental, especially for those who are critical. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. So as I said, I just wanted to quickly touch upon the ups and downs that happen because I think it is important to recognize that there’s always going to be difficult nights from time to time. There’s no such thing as a life without difficult nights, just as there’s no such thing as a life without pain and struggle. What I usually find, just in my experience working with people with chronic insomnia is when that first bout of sleep disruption comes back, it’s the most difficult because all those old thoughts, feelings, worries, come back. And often we are tempted to engage in all those old safety behaviors and rituals that aren’t usually that helpful over the long term. Then perhaps we get through it, then perhaps the sleep disruption comes back later on. And it’s still disruptive, still something we don’t want to happen, but maybe it has a bit of less of an effect on us then we do well than something else happens. So I’m curious to just hear your thoughts. Did you find that you followed a pattern that worked a bit like that? Jeannette Stojcevski: Yeah, so when I would relapse, it was always fairly scary to me, but this last relapse I think was the scariest for some reason. And even though I had gone through this so many times before and insomnia wasn’t new to me, and I knew most people’s insomnia are the same and there’s not really many special cases out there, but for some reason it really freaked me out. And worse than before, like all my other relapses, I was able to get out of them, but because I was only getting a couple hours of sleep, I really felt more desperate than ever to find out what was going on with me. But as soon as I realized, I think how I came to the realization that it was pretty much the same as any other relapse that I’ve had was again, through the education. It was really important for me just to become, I went back because I have a lot of books on insomnia, and I just kind of reeducated myself on things I already knew, things I had already read. And I think sometimes when you’re struggling with something that’s so just kind of embedded in your brain, it’s very hard to get out of it. But for me, just continuing to work on just the thoughts around the fact that, “I am not different, I am the same as all these other people, this is not a different type of relapse, you’re going to get better.” That was helpful to me. And it wasn’t like I did anything too different. It was more just educating myself again. I didn’t try any new techniques or anything, it was just more of the education like, “Okay. All right, this person recovered. Oh, this is why this is happening. I’m hyper aroused.” That word, I just kept remembering that word. “This is hyper arousal. This is nothing more than that. You’re aware that you’re awake and now because of this awareness, your brain’s trying to protect you.” So just understanding logically what was going on was helpful for this last relapse. I think before, I didn’t quite get into the education as much as I did this last time, and it did help. It really did. All of the interviews are so helpful. I want to shake every person’s hand who’s done an interview because each one has something like a snippet, and at some point you have to let them go too. You can’t just listen to videos all day long for the rest of your life, but I think as long as it’s helping, and I didn’t see anything wrong with that, so for me that was education. Martin Reed: Yeah. And the education can be such a huge component because it just strips away any mystery, all those question marks, because insomnia can feel really mysterious and we really caught up in a struggle like, “Why is this happening to me? Why were the nights once like this and now they’re like this?” For example, something I often hear is, “My trouble always used to be falling asleep, but now I can fall asleep okay, but I’m waking during the night. I’m finding it hard to fall back to sleep, whereas that was never the case.” It’s all the same thing, it’s all insomnia, it’s all down to that hyper arousal, just like you touched upon. It’s down to the brain looking out for us, it’s just trying to protect us from being awake at night. All we can do is train it that it’s okay to be awake at night. And to do that, we have to be more willing to experience nighttime wakefulness. We can do that by making it a bit more pleasant when it doesn’t feel good and avoid all those sleep efforts, all those things that we might have been doing with the goal of creating sleep or creating sleepiness. They’re never usually helpful because we’re putting effort into sleep, and sleep doesn’t respond well to effort. And we are reinforcing this idea in our brain that wakefulness is a threat, that it has to be avoided, that, “Okay, brain, I’m tasking you with being alert at night to protect me from wakefulness.” And so as soon as we’re engaged in those efforts, sleep becomes more difficult. So yeah, the education lifts that veil. And I think another big part of that education is giving ourselves the opportunity to continue doing things that are important to us, even when we’ve had difficult nights, just like you were talking about, because it reduces the kind of influence the sleep, wakefulness, or the difficult thoughts and feelings have over our lives. We’re not necessarily getting rid of them because these are things that we can’t control. The only thing we can control are our actions. So as long as we just continue to engage in actions that help us move toward the kind of life we want to live, all this difficult stuff has less of an influence over us. I mean, it still doesn’t feel good, but there’s nothing we can do about that. We can’t make ourselves feel great, but what’s important is that we’re just doing stuff that matters, that’s important to us, even when all this difficult stuff is going on. And I think that’s really key to these long-term transformations like we are talking about here and that we have other guests talking about on the podcast. Jeannette Stojcevski: Yeah. It may not seem like it’s working at first, but it is. There’s things going on that are helping and we just have to remember that. I told clients, I’ve trained so many people over the years and many people with mind-body issues. And I tell them like, “I’m not a doctor, but these are the recommendations. You’re not going to feel the effects of drinking enough water for it may be months or eating better or your energy won’t improve right away, but trust me, it will happen.” And this is the stuff I tell my clients. I said, “But if you don’t start to do this, you’ll probably feel this way for the rest of your life.” And it’s the same thing with this program or insomnia. It may not seem like it’s working at first, but I had to remind myself, “It is working, just give it some time, keep doing the groundwork, laying the foundation.” And little by little your thought patterns do change, your mind does start to relax about sleep, and it just starts to improve little by little, day by day. And I feel like I’m still improving. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah, that’s great. I’m just, like you said, I think these discussions are so helpful and I’m really grateful that you came on to share your experience. So like you were saying, you just want to shake everyone else’s hand. You can shake your own hand too, because you’re on here too and your story is going to be really helpful to a lot of people, but there is still one question that I haven’t asked you yet, which I ask every guest, so I don’t want you to feel left out. And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening, they feel that they’ve tried everything, that they’re just beyond help, there’s nothing they can do to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Jeannette Stojcevski: I would tell them to hire a coach, number one if it’s something that you really feel like you’re struggling with. I did know about this stuff and just for some reason I just didn’t do it, I wouldn’t do it. So give it a real shot, really follow the protocol and give it a shot. And if it’s too hard like it was for me, hire somebody. It’s well worth every dollar spent because I have tried everything, maybe not everything, but thousands, and thousands, and thousands, and thousands, and thousands of dollars on things that didn’t work. Not one thing worked, not one pill, not one potion, nothing worked. But this does work, and it’s worked for many people. So if it’s too difficult, if you just can’t seem to do it on your own, hire somebody, it’s the best investment you can make. And give it a real shot. Don’t just say, “Oh, that won’t work for me because I did that too.” But usually those people may not be doing it in the way like just give it a shot. That’s all I can say. It works, it really works. I’ve been through a lot with insomnia, and I feel so much better, and I’m just continuing to get better. So yeah, that’s what I have to say. Martin Reed: That’s great. Well, I think that’s a great note to end on, so thanks again, Jeannette- Jeannette Stojcevski: You’re welcome. Martin Reed: … for taking the time out to come on and share your story. Jeannette Stojcevski: My pleasure. Thank you. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. Mentioned in this episode: Podcast episode with Michelle talking about things going on “behind the scenes” I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Like many people with chronic insomnia, Eric found that the more he tried to make sleep happen, the more difficult it became. Although he didn’t have any real issues falling asleep, he would regularly wake during the night and find it hard to fall back to sleep. His mind would start racing and he would experience a lot of anxiety. Eric found himself getting obsessed with sleep. He was thinking about it all the time and no matter how hard he tried to relax and no matter what he tried, things just didn’t improve. When we started working together, one of the first changes Eric made was to reduce the amount of time he allotted for sleep to more closely match the amount of sleep he was getting at the time. This allowed him to rediscover the sensation of sleepiness rather than fatigue and that proved to be both reassuring and motivating. Eric also started to respond to nighttime wakefulness in a more workable way. Instead of tossing and turning all night, trying to make sleep happen and trying to relax, he decided to draw instead. This helped make wakefulness a bit more pleasant and helped train his brain that wakefulness wasn’t a threat that it needed to be alert at night to protect him from. Finally, Eric committed to doing things that mattered to him — to live the kind of life he wanted to live — independently of sleep. Eric experienced rapid improvements in his sleep as he changed his response to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. He no longer takes sleeping pills and today, more than one-and-a-half years after we worked together, Eric is no longer engaged in a daily (and nightly) battle with his mind and he continues to sleep well. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: So, Eric, thank you so much for taking the time out for your day to come onto the podcast. Eric Myers: Yeah, thanks for having me. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on. I’m really looking forward to everything that we are going to end up talking about today. So let’s just start right at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began and what you think may have initially triggered that sleep disruption? Eric Myers: It was the spring of 2020, so this is when the beginning of the COVID hysteria and stuff. And I think I had some health anxiety. I tried not to get caught up in all that stuff, but I think, I don’t know, I have a tendency to be a little bit of a hypochondriac anyway, so I probably didn’t help. I remember it was starting to interfere with my sleep. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I remember talking to my doctor about it, and at some point I started focusing more on the sleep, I guess, because I just was like, “Ah, I got to get some sleep. This is ridiculous.” And once I started worrying about that all the time, then it just got worse. And the harder I tried, the worse I got. It seems like once it started going down that path, just like it’s a snowball effect or something, it just gets worse the harder you try. Martin Reed: Yeah. So do you feel it was all that kind of stress, worry, anxiety related to the pandemic that triggered that initial sleep disruption? Eric Myers: Yeah. I mean, something like that. I mean, I remember someone that I knew had recently passed away suddenly and I think I had that on my mind too. But I think that was more or less how it got started. Martin Reed: And so, what was that sleep disruption for you? Was it just at a basic level? Was it difficulty falling asleep or was it kind of staying asleep once you first fell asleep? Or maybe it was a bit of both of those things? Eric Myers: I think I was okay with falling asleep, but I would always wake up in the middle of the night and then that’s when it would start to get weird. I think later on, maybe it was a little of both, but initially it was more an issue with sleep maintenance. Martin Reed: So when you fell asleep and you woke up and then you found it hard to fall back to sleep, why do you think that that was the case, was there loads of stuff just racing through your mind or did it just seem to be like no obvious course what was going on? Eric Myers: Yeah, I remember just a lot of stuff in my mind and just remember feeling weird because, like I said, it was kind of a hypochondriac. And so anything, if I just felt sick at all, I would just start imagining things and I’m like, I don’t know, what’s wrong with me? And then I remember getting the chills for some reason and then just having this weird breathing issue or something, just weird stuff like that. But I think I was just having anxiety like anxiety attack, and then that’s when I would just be up for sometimes hours just trying to relax. Martin Reed: And so, what about your days, were you finding that there was any kind of knock on effect on your days related to all this struggle with sleep and all that wakefulness during the night? Eric Myers: Yeah, once it became an ongoing issue, I mean, in some ways, it seems like the days were worse than the nights because I’d just be thinking about it all the time, I became obsessed with it, which I think it happens to people with chronic, and some, you become kind of OCD about all this stuff. This is something that you talk about a lot is the way you react to insomnia really has a big effect on whether or not it becomes a chronic problem, and I definitely didn’t respond well to it. Martin Reed: Yeah. So I’m guessing that every other human being on the planet, you’ve experienced some difficult nights from time to time before this longer term struggle with sleep. When you were going through this, when you first experienced that sleep disruption, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but my guess is at first you’re just like, “Well, this probably the reason why I’m struggling is because everything is going on right now, normal, this has happened before.” But when did you get to that point where you started to think, why is this sticking around? This is different this time around, there’s something unique or there’s something this feels different. Why is this sleep issue sticking around?” When did that happen and why do you think that was? Eric Myers: Yeah. For some reason I just became really focused on it and it seemed like the more attention that I gave to it then the worse it got. If I would’ve just blown it off and didn’t worry about it, I probably would’ve been fine. I really became determined to overcome this, and then the harder I tried, the worst it got. Martin Reed: Yeah. Was it just after those first couple of nights that you started to really get more concerned and look for solutions? I’m just curious how long this sleep disruption was going on for before you figured out, “Well, there’s something a little bit different going on this time around,” and that’s when all that extra attention, all that extra focus happened. Eric Myers: Maybe a couple weeks, something like that. I don’t know. Because at that time, I really didn’t know much about sleep, so I remember thinking like what happens, can this just keep going on until I just collapse or something, and I didn’t know what to expect. So I don’t know, I just worried about it a lot, which just made it worse, of course. Martin Reed: I’m curious to hear what kind of things you’d tried in response. So you know the sleep issue stuck around for a couple of weeks and that’s when we start to think, “Okay, we got to fix this problem now.” So we are completely understandably going to put more attention on our sleep. Those of us who have made this journey and have put the insomnia behind us can recognize that it is a lot of that attention that we gives insomnia is often what feeds it, what gives it that oxygen that it needs to survive. But when we’re caught up in a struggle, when we’re struggling with something, it’s understandable, we want to fix it. And then part of that fixing process is usually attention and effort, but unfortunately sleep just doesn’t tend to respond well to those things. So I’m just curious to hear what kind of things you tried initially after those couple of weeks. What kind of techniques or things did you try to improve your situation? Eric Myers: Yeah. I think I tried the same stuff that everybody probably tries, tea, like the Sleepytime tea and melatonin. Because people like friends, family, coworkers, everybody is trying to give me advice and help, but they don’t really know what to do. So I’m just trying everything that everybody’s like, “Oh well, yeah, melatonin, that worked for me,” or something. Or essential oils, that was another thing that I tried that like you put on your skin or something, it was supposed to relax you. They got something for everything. And I started seeing a therapist too at one point just for treating anxiety, but just wasn’t what I needed, I guess. Martin Reed: I’m curious to hear if you found when you tried all these things when people are telling you, “Oh, this worked for me, try this,” or maybe you’re looking on Dr. Google and Google is suggesting that, “Oh, try this.” And then when those things don’t work, a lot of the time they can feed that worry and that anxiety and that fear, then you start to perhaps think that there is something really uniquely wrong with your sleep. Because after all, if all these things are working for other people, why aren’t they working for me? Is that something you experience? Eric Myers: Oh yeah. The level of worry and anxiety about this was just unbelievable. I was just imagining what’s going to happen to me and be so sleep deprived that I won’t even be able to function. I don’t know. I just really was starting to go off the deep end, all that. Martin Reed: I believe that before we started working together, did end up getting prescribed some sleeping pills or sleep supplements, something like that? What was that experience? Did you find that helpful even if only in the short term? Eric Myers: Yeah. Okay. So my doctor gave me a prescription for Trazodone, which is a really popular medication for sleep. I remember, at first, I was trying to avoid drugs because I didn’t want to go down that road. But eventually, I mean, I just got so desperate. I started with the over the counter stuff like Zzzquil and stuff, which actually helped for a little while. But once I started having issues again, then like, “Well, now what do I do?” So then I broke down and started taking the Trazodone, but even that would only helped temporarily. Martin Reed: I think you mentioned one of the pitfalls that we can experience when we take medication or supplements or rely on anything external to our own sleep mechanisms, so to speak, is that we can experience that kind of short-term relief, which is great, and for many people, it can be really helpful. But then if we ever experience a difficult night when we are using that thing, that external thing, then it can generate this kind of return, that flood of all that worry and stress and anxiety that, “Oh, I took that thing that was helping and now that’s not even working.” And it can just create its own fresh set of problems, which can be a huge part of the frustration. Eric Myers: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you get to a point where, “Well, I’ve tried everything, I don’t know what to do now.” And that’s not a good feeling. Martin Reed: So let’s move forward a little bit. When we started to work together, one of the first changes that you made was… A lot of the stuff that we do when we’re working together is behavioral in nature because a lot of all the things that we do to try and improve our sleep, try and get rid of that wakefulness is it’s completely well intentioned and it even sounds logical a lot of the time, but much of the time it can end up actually perpetuate that sleep disruption. And one of the common things that we do when we are really trying to chase sleep is we spend more time in bed. We might go to bed earlier or we might stay in bed later, we might try napping during the day. And I think when we started working together, you were averaging less than five hours of sleep but spending about seven hours in bed. So you started to rein that in a little bit and a little bit less time for sleep. Can you tell us a little bit more about that change that you made? Eric Myers: Yeah, I think that was really helpful actually. That might have been one of the most helpful things now that I think about it. I forget what my sleep window was when we started working together. Because I started noticing an improvement very quickly, I remember that. That second week when I started implementing the sleep restriction or bedtime restriction, I think I started noticing an improvement just that week and just it got better from there. Martin Reed: First and foremost, I think it’s great that you experience that change so quickly. I think of all the clients I’ve worked with, you are probably one of the quickest to notice a change just from implementing that sleep window, just allotting an amount of time for sleep that’s a bit closer to the current reality of the sleep that you were getting at that time. Why do you feel that that was so helpful and so quickly? Was it just because you noticed a return of a strong sense of sleepiness rather than it just being exclusively fatigue and grogginess at night? I’m just curious to hear why you feel that you got those results, and what changed when you just started to go to bed later? Eric Myers: Okay, let’s see. I mean, I remember I guess just being genuinely sleepy instead of trying to… Well, because at that point I was still taking the medication, so I remember starting to noticing the difference between the feeling you get when you take drugs like that as opposed to natural sleep, and I remember noticing that pretty early on and that maybe helped my anxiety or sleep worry a little bit there. Martin Reed: Another change that you made a little bit later on whilst we were still working together was just a change in how you would respond to nighttime wakefulness, whether it was you’d go to bed and was taking you a long time to fall asleep or if you’d wake during the night and find it really hard to fall asleep instead of forcing yourself to stay in bed, tossing and turning, not feeling good, feeling frustrated, worried, anxious, trying to make sleep happen, instead you just thought to yourself, “All right, well, I’m awake anyway, let’s just do something to being awake a bit more pleasant.” Can you tell us a little bit more about that process and that change that you made? Eric Myers: Yeah, that was another thing that was really helpful because that’s one of the issues that I think I’m pretty sure I had was what you call a conditioned arousal where I had spent so much time lying in bed tossing and turning that I had trained my brain to associate the bed with anxiety and frustration instead of sleep. One of the things that was a key for me was coming up with an out of bed activity, which is ideally something quiet and relaxing. And the first thing I thought of was drawing because that’s something I do. So I started doing that and I guess the thing that was really great about that is not only was it something I enjoyed doing, so I didn’t mind getting out of bed to do it. And also, that’s another thing, I remember that, I can’t remember if it was from the course or was one of your videos, but you talked about quality of sleep. As you start to condense your sleep into a shorter sleep window, there’s a tendency for the quality to improve like you get more deep sleep and I started to experience that, and again, it happened really relatively quick for me. I mean, I didn’t have to even practice that technique very long before it, I just started sleeping, I mean, it just got better and better. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think the reason I like these two techniques and just allotting an appropriate amount of time for sleep and just making any unpleasant nighttime wakefulness more pleasant is because it really just gets to what insomnia is all about. And it is basically just this strong desire that we have completely understandable desire, but that strong desire to just avoid nighttime wakefulness. We don’t want to be awake, we want to be asleep. And the more we crave sleep, the more we want to really avoid being awake at night. The more the brain might think that our wakefulness must be a threat, it must be this physical danger or threat that’s going to harm us, so I’ve got to be alert to protect you from that. Because my number one job is your brain, is to protect you. So when we implement a sleep window, for example, we give ourselves an earliest possible bedtime, a consistent out of bedtime in the morning. Martin Reed: We are no longer chasing after sleep by going to bed a lot earlier than we might otherwise, or staying in bed later to try and grab a few more minutes of sleep or an extra hour or so of sleep with the idea of getting out of bed or just doing something else during the night. If the brain kind of learns that not all nighttime wakefulness has to be awfully unpleasant nighttime wakefulness, there are things we can do to make it a bit more pleasant, then that also chips away that brain’s belief that being awake at night is a threat, is a danger. So we are no longer chasing sleep. We are no longer enduring so much unpleasant nighttime wakefulness. It all kind of helps the brain learn that, “Oh okay, maybe this wakefulness, although it’s not what we really want, it’s not a danger.” So I don’t have to activate all that fight or flight mechanism to try and protect you from wakefulness, which we can recognize when the body is activating his fight or flight response, it’s probably not going to be good conditions for sleep at that time. Eric Myers: Yeah, absolutely. Martin Reed: Okay. So just before I move on, I’m curious to hear, when we were working together, if there were any other kind of techniques or ways of thinking that you picked on up on that you feel contributed to being able to move on from insomnia to put all that behind you. Eric Myers: Yeah. I mean, I think I have mentioned this earlier, but one of the things that really resonated with me was something that you talked about as far as the way that respond to sleep or insomnia. Because even though I sleep very well most of the time, I mean, occasionally there’s an off night, so that’s something I learned is just to not worry about it and it’s not a big deal and I just bounce right back and everything is fine. And I think that’s one of the things that maybe separates somebody who just has a bad night sleep and somebody who becomes a continual issue and becomes chronic. Martin Reed: Yeah. How do we get to that point though? I think many of us can realize that it is really that response that might be making things more difficult in our lives, the worry, the anxiety, the frustration, the stress, how we feel the next day, all of that stuff. And a lot of us can probably recognize that if we are able to let that go, not only will we probably feel better, but we’ll probably also sleep better. But how do we actually get to that point? Eric Myers: So for me, I think the first thing in the course was the sleep education, just learning how sleep works and just the basic stuff, sleep drive, circadian rhythm, was it arousal system, just understanding those things and how they all work and kind of work together. That helped me a lot, just knowing I don’t have to worry like this is going to go on forever. That right there helped relieve a lot of the worry and anxiety from me. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think education is really helpful because there are a lot of ideas that we might have about how sleep should be or how it should work that really can feed into all our worries and our anxieties about sleep when we are experiencing sleep disruption. I think most of all what it helps do is it just eliminates the mystery behind everything. Because when we’re struggling, we want to know why, and when we don’t know why, that’s when we end up down the rabbit hole of looking for solutions, doing all of that research and it can consume us when we lift that veil of mystery and we start to have answers for everything that’s going on and we realize that there’s no real mystery to it. These things are happening understandably, predictably, and they’re all normal. I think that can just be so helpful. And it sounds like that was what really helps contribute to that change in your own mindset. Eric Myers: Yeah, oh definitely. Yeah. It helped me just see the bigger picture and understand how it all fits together. Martin Reed: When you were caught up in that struggle, were you finding everything that comes with it, the difficult thoughts, the difficult feelings, the fatigue, all that stuff? Were you finding that it was influencing your daytime behaviors like the kind of activities you might engage in, the things you might plan for, the things you might do? Eric Myers: Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, I actually had some vacation plans with a friend of mine that I canceled because I was like, “I got to deal with this and I didn’t feel up to it,” or whatever, which now I understand that was a complete wrong way to approach things. But at the time, I didn’t understand. Martin Reed: I think it’s important to recognize that it’s normal and natural that we are going to want to cancel plans or withdraw from things when we are dealing with struggle and we’re dealing with challenge and dealing with pain, that’s normal. I mean, sometimes it can be helpful. Sometimes we got to just look out for ourselves and do what’s right for us, and that might mean taking a rest day, taking some time off, just some self-care, self-compassion when we’re going through struggle. But what can sometimes happen is it just consumes us and we end up just really withdrawing and just moving away from doing all the things that help us live the kind of life we want to live. So something might be really important to us like socializing with friends that might be a really important value for us. And we start to cancel those plans or not meet up with friends and isolate ourselves. Martin Reed: And that doesn’t tend to make us sleep better, it usually doesn’t help us feel better either because we’re then living a life that’s not aligned with our values, we’re just not living the kind of life we want to live. So I think that trying to commit to some kind of behaviors that are aligned with our values, even when we are really caught up in a struggle, can be helpful. They don’t have to be huge things. Maybe we are not quite ready for that round the world cruise yet or something, or a one year backpacking trip around the world, but maybe we are not even ready to go out to restaurants or bars. But maybe instead if, for example, socializing is important for us, maybe we can just pick up the phone and just talk to some friends, just do some things, even if they’re just baby steps that are just aligned with our values so that we are maybe separating our actions a little bit from all the difficult stuff that’s going on inside of us. Martin Reed: And I think the more we can do that, the more we can separate the difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions from our own actions can be really helpful because then all those thoughts, feelings and emotions, they’re still there, we can’t get rid of them, not over the long-term, they’re always going to be with us for as long as we’re human beings, but maybe they’ll have less of an influence over our lives that isn’t helpful, an influence that leads to behaviors that aren’t going to help us live the kind of life we want to live. Martin Reed: How did you approach that? I mean, I just find it interesting because I have some clients, they’re just like, “I’m just going to force myself to live the life as though I got the greatest night of sleep every single day.” And others are just like, “Got to take tiny, teeny baby steps.” I’m curious to hear where you are on that. How were you able to go from canceling plans, withdrawing from the kind of life you want to live to maybe just breaking that connection between sleep and what you do, what was your process there? Eric Myers: Oh yeah. I mean, before, I just didn’t realize that avoiding things and canceling things, I didn’t understand that that was not helpful and probably working against me in a way. So I guess it was more that learning process and starting to understand that doing things that I actually want to do is a good thing and would actually help me in a way that I didn’t realize before. Martin Reed: So was it just a case of, this is the stuff I used to do, I’m just going to start doing it again? Did you just slowly start integrating the good stuff back into your days or was it just a case of right from now on, I’m just not going to allow this to control my actions during the day? Eric Myers: Yeah, I think once I started to understand that I shouldn’t allow those things to derail my life, then I just went in the opposite direction. Martin Reed: Yeah. And did you find that was difficult at first? Maybe you were still struggling with sleep and you felt pretty fatigued during the day. Was it kind of difficult to motivate yourself to do that during the day, or was it just as soon as you started to do it you just immediately felt all the better for it? Eric Myers: No, I don’t think it was really difficult. I mean, my whole way of looking at things changed. I mean, it’s amazing like when you change your perspective on something, how different you can feel about everything, you have this really positive experience actually. Martin Reed: Wow, that’s great. So I think it was maybe a year and a half or so that we actually stopped working together. How have things been going in that year and a half, have you found that when we stopped working together maybe your sleep carried on improving or did it stay about the same? What have things been like for you over that time? Eric Myers: Oh yeah, over time sleep just got better and better. I mean, gradually but definitely just kept improving for quite a while it just gradually got better and better. Martin Reed: I’m always curious to hear just because some clients, they make progress really quickly. Just within the first couple of weeks, they notice really positive improvements. Some clients takes a little bit longer. Some clients, they don’t really notice much improvement at all in the eight weeks that we’re working together, but then they somehow get this light bulb moment or they make some kind of breakthrough after we are no longer working together because they’re carrying on practicing what they’ve been learning. And it is a process, and for some people, it takes us longer. Some people, the process isn’t quite as long. But the reason why I love all this stuff that we talk about on the podcast is that really it’s skills based, it’s about learning new ways of thinking about exploring our relationship with our thoughts and our emotions. Martin Reed: And it’s about implementing behaviors that are going to help set the stage for sleep and help us just move toward the kind of life you want to live independently of sleep. And these are all things that we can control, they’re all actions, they’re all skills. So they’re with us for life and I think they are really helpful over the long-term, not just at first, it’s not a quick fix, so it can take time for us to notice results, but those results set us up for the rest of our lives just because we are armed with that knowledge that you touched upon, we have that education, we know why things are happening, there’s no more mystery. And if we ever experience that sleep disruption again in the future, we now have experience, we know that we can get through it and we know all the stuff that is helpful and all the stuff that’s not helpful. Martin Reed: And so, I do often see clients that tell me that their biggest improvements occur once we stop working together and they’re just practicing this stuff by themselves and they notice that they continue to enjoy improvements. And then maybe there’s some sleep disruption, there’s ups and downs because we all have difficult nights from time to time, but we know exactly how to respond now. So the way we respond is completely different and our response is often a lot more constructive by this point. So like you touched upon earlier, those difficult nights don’t have to mean that this is going to stick around for weeks, months, years. Now we might be in a place where we recognize I had a difficult night, that doesn’t have to mean that insomnia is back and I’m going to be struggling again because I’m just in a whole different place now. Eric Myers: Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly. And one thing I was going to say that was pretty significant for me because when I was working with you, I was still taking the medication, and by the end of the course, I realized I didn’t need it anymore. So that was a big step for me because back then it was probably more of just a psychological dependency I had on, I was like, “I got to take something. I can’t just go to bed without taking anything.” So getting over that was a really big deal for me. Martin Reed: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. What was your process with that? Did you just get to a point where you thought, “I don’t think I need this anymore,” or was it a tapering off plan, or what did you do? Eric Myers: Yeah. I got a pill cutter and tapered off. I probably didn’t need to, but I don’t know, that’s what I did. I mean, once I decided to do that, I mean, I was off really quick. I mean, it probably was all in my head anyway. I probably never needed that stuff in the first place so I’m sure I could have stopped anytime, but I had that idea in my head that, “Oh, got to take something. I can’t just go to bed without taking something to try and knock myself out or something.” So that was really a big thing for me. Martin Reed: When did you engage in that process of just moving away from the medication, was it whilst we were still working together or was it when we were done working together and you just decided to make that change? Eric Myers: It was right at the end of the course. Martin Reed: Sometimes I have people that feel like they have to choose like, “Do I engage in behavior change and exploring all this relationship with everything that’s going on inside me, or do I do the medication? How do I choose which one?” But the truth is we don’t have to choose. We can do both at the same time if that’s what we feel comfortable with. I’ve had clients that like yourself, they’re on the medication whilst we’re working together and then they make a decision at some point to move away, and that’s fine. I have other clients that stop immediately. After talking to their doctor, they stop or they taper before or during when we’re working together. It really doesn’t make a difference, it’s not an either or choice we have to make, I think there’s value in learning these skills regardless of whether we’re taking medication or not. And then the medication is something that clients can explore themselves whenever they feel ready to do so, just like you did. Eric Myers: Yeah. Yeah. I remember before I started the course, I remember thinking, I was a little hesitant and I was like, “Well, I’m probably going to have to give up my sleep meds,” and I was feeling anxious about that, but then I remember you saying like, “Oh, if it’s something you take every night, then you can just keep doing that. It doesn’t matter.” But that was a big deal because I didn’t want to be on pills for the rest of my life. Martin Reed: Yeah. So in this year and a half that you’ve been on your own, so to speak, I’m guessing that you’ve had some difficult nights every now and then. What’s your reaction now to when you have a difficult night and how has that changed compared to the past? Eric Myers: Oh yeah, I just don’t worry about it. I mean, I understand it’s normal and it’s not a big deal, so I just go on with my day and don’t let it bother me. And then next night I bounce right back, it’s no problem. Martin Reed: The reason I like asking about that is because we have to be realistic that there are still going to be some difficult nights from time to time, because as human beings, we’re going to have difficult nights from time to time, there’s nothing we can do about that. No one has a great night of sleep every single night. But I think the change is, we become more resilient to it when it happens. And like you said, that response is different now, instead of it generating all these really difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions and maybe influencing our behaviors in a way that’s not going to help us live the kind of life we want to live, now we’re just more accepting. But we had a difficult night, we can’t control sleep. Maybe there is a return of some difficult thoughts, some difficult feelings, some difficult emotions there, but now we’ve got that resilience to more flexibly respond to them. Martin Reed: We realize that we’ve got options in how we respond to them and we can respond in ways that are helpful and we can respond in ways that are less helpful. And often the brain screams at us to do the less helpful stuff, but if we can just take a step back, pause for a second, we always get to decide how we respond and really, like you’ve been talking about, it’s our response that really determines how tangled up or not we might get in that struggle. Eric Myers: Yeah. Yeah. That’s funny because after I completed the course, I mean, I remember there was a lot of nights where I still had some of that worry, “Oh, wonder if I’m going to be able to sleep tonight or something.” But then I still slept even though I was had some of that worry. And then over time, it became less and less. But now it’s just don’t worry about it, it’s no big deal. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think that’s a great point that you made this, we can still feel that worry or anxiety or whatever, but we can still sleep, that doesn’t have to be a barrier to sleep. I think what the real barrier to sleep often is our natural human desire not to experience worry, anxiety and all those difficult emotions because they don’t feel good. So when we feel them, our natural inclination is to try and push them away, or before we feel them, we want to avoid them, so we are just doing all we can to try and get rid of it. And I think that’s what the real struggle is when we get engaged in that battle. That’s what really can make sleep more difficult. It’s not necessarily their presence, but it’s our struggle with them. Martin Reed: All right, Eric, I’m really grateful for the time you’ve taken out your day to come onto the podcast, but I do have one last question for you. And it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Eric Myers: Here’s the thing, I feel like I had it as bad as anybody could possibly have it. I mean, my level of sleep related worry and anxiety and everything, I mean, it was just ridiculous. So if somebody who was as screwed up as I was can, I mean, really recover, then it seems like there’s got to be hope for anybody. I mean, if I can do it, I think anybody can do it. Martin Reed: That’s great. All right. Well, Eric, again, thanks again for taking the time out for your date to come onto the podcast. Really appreciate it. Eric Myers: Yeah. And thanks for all your help. Really means a lot to me. Martin Reed: Thank you. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Vicky dealt with her insomnia by taking sleeping pills and this seemed to work well until one night, after 20 years of regular use, the medication didn’t help her sleep. This led Vicky to think that something was wrong with her. She felt alone. She felt that without getting the amount of sleep she wanted to get, she would be unable to take care of her children and she wouldn’t be able to be the person she wanted to be or live the life she wanted to live. She started to experience a lot of anxiety and would wake up in the middle of the night and have panic attacks. This all led Vicky to explore a new approach to insomnia that involved letting go of the struggle. She began to recognize that difficult thoughts and feelings, although very unpleasant, didn’t need to prevent her from doing things that mattered — so she didn’t need to engage in a battle with them. Vicky started to allow her mind to think what it wanted to think and to generate the full range of human feelings and emotions. She started to acknowledge and make space for thoughts and feelings — even though she often wished they weren’t showing up — instead of going to war with them. She committed to doing things that were important and meaningful even after difficult nights and even in the presence of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. Today, Vicky still experiences some difficult nights from time to time but she is no longer engaged in an exhausting and distracting battle with her mind throughout the day and throughout the night. She is living the kind of life she wants to live even when difficult nights happen and even when uncomfortable thoughts and feelings show up. In fact, Vicky now thinks of her insomnia as a gift — as something that has helped her become more resilient and better able to react in a more workable way to the difficulties we all experience as human beings. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay. So Vicky, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, absolutely. I’m really grateful to be here. Thank you. Martin Reed: I’m really looking forward to everything that we are hoping to cover today, so let’s just dive right in. Let’s start, if you could just tell us when your sleep problems first began and what you think caused those initial issues with sleep. Vicky Chiu: I’ll start right from the very beginning where it all started in my teens and I think it’s about when I was 17. I got my very first early morning job, and of course, that got my nerves going before when I go to bed, and actually I didn’t sleep well. But then going on forward with that job, I had hung on to that problem and stress, but not being able to sleep. I also have a background where my father has insomnia too, so being around a house of not good sleep was normal. And I went to him because he had the same kind of problems so obviously he was probably a good person to go to at that time. And so he’s commonly on Zopiclone, the blue pill is what people commonly know it as. But yeah, he gave me one of those and it worked fine and from then I just started taking a little bit of it, maybe a quarter, not even the full thing, but that just began the habit of relying on sleeping pills whenever I had an early morning. So then fast forward into my twenties, it would be every day before I go to bed for work, very manageable. And then on the weekends I would be totally off of it. So really it was psychological if you think about it. And then fast forward again until my late thirties now, I have three kids and the first two were fine with sleep and everything. The third one, I’m not sure what changed, but I think it was because of my third. It was all these little pieces of puzzles that came into place then it fit really well to create this big monster of insomnia, anxiety and stress. It was my third one and it was going to be our last one, so I was very cherishing that moment. And then when the infant stage moved on, I was grieving that stage and she just grew up so fast and I think I was sad that way. And then at the same time I just cut off nursing, right off, and that was hard too. And I think because of that there was also a lot of hormones related to not breastfeeding anymore, and so I had a very hard time letting go of that. Plus then going to sleep, I was thinking about that and there was one night that just triggered everything where I couldn’t sleep so I was like, oh, I’m just going to take this sleeping pill. I took half, didn’t work, I took another half and it didn’t work. And I was like, okay, I don’t want to overdose on this so I’m like, the sleeping pills not working, so this is a problem. And then that ignited a lot of stuff like anxiety and then panic attacks in the middle of the night. I would wake up in the middle of the night and have a panic attack and then not be able to fall asleep. So it really spiraled downwards in 2021 of September. Martin Reed: Yeah. I hear that quite a lot. I’m thinking just to myself that I think a lot of people are going to identify with that process where you have the sleeping pill or the supplement or whatever that external thing is that we rely on as a crutch to get us through difficult nights. And those things tend to be fine for as long as they have an effect. But then the downside is that when that experience happens where we use that crutch and it doesn’t seem to have an effect, then we can just become so much more worried than perhaps we would’ve done if that crutch wasn’t even available to us. Because now we’re taking that thing that we’ve always believed will generate sleep for us and even that’s not working now and that can really be quite scary. Was that the case for you when you found that wasn’t helping anymore? Vicky Chiu: Yes. So once the sleeping pill didn’t work, it was very scary because it’s worked for me for the last 20 years, and I’m taking one and a half of the amount that I used to take at least. And so I’m like, yeah, there’s something wrong with me. The feelings of, there’s something wrong and I’m the only one because sleeping pills should be working for everyone, especially the prescription ones. So yeah, it caused a lot of anxiety and stress. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah, it’s really interesting. This whole relationship we can have with just sleeping pills, it really doesn’t matter, it’s just whatever that external thing is that we rely on or we see is a safety net. I think what happens is, it’s a comfort. So we take that pill, we’ve known from experience that now sleep is going to happen. So all that worry, that pressure we might be putting on ourselves to sleep, that effort we might be putting into sleep, we just drop all that struggle. And I think that might be one of the real mechanisms behind how they actually work. It’s less to do with whatever’s in what we are taking and more to do with just, I’ve taken that thing, now I can relax, I don’t have to worry, I don’t have to fight with my mind, I don’t have to try anymore. And it’s that abandonment of the trying that tends to generate that good sleep. And so then going back to your experience, okay I’ve taken this pill, but if there’s still that big underlying anxiety or worry or stress going on, the mind is still going to be churning over that. So then we find, oh, now this pill isn’t working. And I hate using the air quotes, but it’s not working, it’s not getting the desired result. And just like you said, then you just start to get really worried because now it’s like, well this isn’t even working now. What’s going on? I must be unique, but it’s not. It’s just down to the fact that at the end of the day we haven’t got to the root cause, that root problem of what’s creating this long term sleep disruption. And I’m sure we’ll get to talk some more about that. But really it just comes down to our relationship with all those thoughts and feelings that are going on in our mind and often a change in our behaviors as we try to protect our sleep, try and make more sleep happen and just fix the problem that we’re dealing with, right? Vicky Chiu: And actually that’s how I found out about your podcast actually was, I felt alone, but I was like, realistically I can’t be alone. So I just searched up insomnia and just anything to help me during the day to listen to other people’s stories. And I did listen to one of your podcasts with a lady, I think she was a mother too, and somehow she went on the sleeping pill and it didn’t work for her. It didn’t solve my problem, but it was very comforting to know that and hear a real true story that it wasn’t working for someone else. And so that’s when I really started to do my research and start doing more digging. Martin Reed: Yeah. And this is exactly why I’m so grateful for guests like yourself coming on and just talking about this because it can be so helpful, so comforting, just to know that you’re not alone, that what you’re going through isn’t unique or unusual. That in itself can just be so reassuring. And like you said, it’s not going to necessarily fix everything, just knowing that isn’t going to fix everything. But it’s just so reassuring. So yeah, I’m really grateful for you coming on just to talk about this in your own words because it is really helpful for so many people. So let’s just rewind a little bit. So you had that really difficult night when the medication just didn’t seem to work. How do you think that then progressed onto subsequent nights of sleep disruption? Because you’ve got this long history of sleep disruption before ups and downs. What was it, do you think this time around after that really difficult night when the medication didn’t seem to work that… why do you feel like things didn’t bounce back and recover? Why did things progress and stick around do you think? Vicky Chiu: I think just because the realization that the sleeping pill can not work was a big one and I didn’t have that crutch anymore. And then it just, I didn’t even think that the sleeping pill wouldn’t work. I never had that thought before. So then since then that it didn’t work, it was in my head, then your brain’s like, it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. What if it doesn’t work? You’re going to be up all night and then your entire day, the next day’s going to be screwed and you’re not going to be able to take care of your children properly. You’re going to be short tempered, impatient, you’re going to be a bad mother. All those stuff start to creep in and yeah, that’s just very stressful and lots of anxiety around that. Especially when you’re alone at night, it gets really lonely because there’s really no one to talk to at that point. And when you’re feeling like that, you really want someone to be with you. I think like that for me at least. And so it’s a very stressful and also very scary time because the night can be so long if you’re not sleeping and then at that time you’re just all by yourself too. And you’re like, what do I do? I tried all sorts of stuff and it just didn’t work. Martin Reed: Yeah. What were the nights like at that time? Was it just really, you were just finding it hard to first fall asleep at the start of the night or was it to do with waking and finding it hard to fall back to sleep? Or was it just all of the above? Vicky Chiu: Yeah. My whole entire insomnia experience always started with just falling asleep, and then after that it’d be fine. I could wake up, go to the washroom, whatever, it’s fine, I could go back to sleep. But after that big night of the sleepy pill not working, then even when I fall asleep I would be woken up by, I don’t know, I have children, they would wake us up sometimes or my partner snoring, that would wake me up. And that would be like, oh my God, now what if I can’t fall asleep? So I’ll hold onto that, which obviously is not the way to fall back asleep, but a lot of people out there they probably don’t know the best is just to let go, which is also the hardest thing to do. Martin Reed: Yeah, right. Yeah. It’s so easy to say that, isn’t it? Oh just let go. Just don’t think of anything, think positive. But yeah, actually doing it is very difficult. So you touched on this before that when we have a problem we try and fix it. So you obviously tried some different things before finding this collection of tools, which we’ll definitely discuss that you did find helpful. But before you got to that point where you were actually doing stuff that looking back, this was what was really truly the good stuff, the goal that was really helpful. What kind of things had you tried to try and turn things around that on reflection perhaps one that helpful, maybe even ended up being a bit of a distraction? Vicky Chiu: Ooh, there’s probably many. I would say it was just more a stress around preparing for sleep. So I would do a lot of yin yoga or yoga nidra, but it was a way to relax, but then I got stressed out like, oh, I need to set aside at least half an hour before going to sleep so I can do my yoga and stretches or meditation. And I think that was a bit of a distraction because I’m already creating that worry pre-bedtime. And then if let’s say I can’t get that in because the night was just so crazy, then the level of stress would be kicked up a notch, right? So, those things are good, but then I don’t know, for someone who has trouble sleeping might not be. At least for me, it was more of a distraction, like you said. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah, yeah. I think it just comes down to intent, right? Because like you said, all these things, they’re not necessarily harmful, but anything that we do with the goal of generating sleep, we are just putting more pressure on ourselves and it takes away the whole purpose of whatever we’re doing. So many of my clients, they talk about meditation, relaxation techniques and stuff like that. And certainly I’m never going to say, don’t do that. It’s a bad thing. How can that be a bad thing? But if we are doing it, we’ve got this really set rituals, like half an hour before bed, I have to do this meditation routine or this breathing exercise, we’ve got to do it in order to make sleep happen or to help me feel more relaxed for sleep to happen. We just immediately making ourselves less relaxed because we’re putting all this pressure on ourselves to first of all do this routine or ritual. If we don’t, like you said, then we become really worried. Now I missed that opportunity. And second of all, the whole time we are doing it that we’re trying to let go, we’re trying to relax, we’re trying to be more present, we’re doing it with the goal of influencing something that’s going to happen in the future that we have no control over. So it really becomes self-defeating. And I think that’s where we can really get tripped up with all this sleep hygiene stuff that is so prevalent out there. I think it can be helpful as a preventative thing, maybe if we’re burning the candle at both ends, but other than that we sleep great then yeah, sure, let’s do an unwinding time. Let’s just make sure the temperature of our bedroom is optimal, for example. But if we are dealing with chronic insomnia, no amount of sleep hygiene is going to help. And it can actually be more of a hindrance because we end up just adding more of these rituals and more of these sleep efforts to our lives and when they don’t work, which is actually to be expected, then we can more worries. It’s like when that pill doesn’t work, right? Oh, this sleep hygiene everyone’s telling me about, even that’s not working. I must be truly unique and truly broken. But it’s normal and it’s to be expected. We just want to get to that point where we are not engaged in all those efforts or we just drop that struggle. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. Honestly, I’ve used everything and all of the tools around better sleep, relaxing, just does not work for me, at least within insomnia. The blue light cancellation glasses, all the different supplements you can think of. Vitamins, magnesium, melatonin. Yeah, there’s lots of supplements. And that was in itself stressful. Like, oh, I’ve got to take this 30 minutes before bedtime and sometimes I would forget. I’m like, oh no, then get out of bed and go get those supplements and eat that and then it doesn’t work. And so it creates a whole level of anxiety again, which it’s just the effort that you put into it that you’re not supposed to. But yeah, you just don’t realize that you’re doing all of that stuff. Martin Reed: Yeah, and it’s understandable why we would do that, right? Because when we have a problem, we want to put effort into the solution. But unfortunately sleep is this unique thing where it doesn’t respond well to effort. So the more we try, the more we struggle. That’s really what it comes down to. So when we think about it, what’s our brain’s number one job? It’s to look out for us, it’s to protect us. So it’s going to generate all these difficult thoughts, these difficult feelings and emotions, not to make us feel bad, but to actually look out for us to try to help us, to help us look for a solution, to help us live the life we want to live, to be aware of threats and risks. None of us would be alive today if our brain didn’t do that. But when we’re really struggling, the brain goes into overdrive. It tries so hard to help us that it actually ends up getting in the way. And I think the more we engage in those efforts to change how we feel, sometimes then the brain thinks, you’re not listening to me. Why are you not listening to me? This is serious. And so it screams even louder at us. It generates even more intense and difficult thoughts and feelings. And the more we try to make sleep happen, the more we reinforce to the brain that, wow, this wakefulness is serious. It’s a real threat. Maybe it’s a danger. You’ve got to be alert during the night to protect me from being awake. And then as soon as we’re telling the brain to be alert for wakefulness, it’s going to make it difficult because we all recognize that an alert brain probably isn’t going to be helpful if our goal is to sleep. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. So true. Yeah. Then your bed and your pillow turns into something that’s an alert for your brain instead of, it’s time to relax. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. As far as your brain’s concerned, there’s this imaginary 600 pound gorilla just sitting on your bed waiting to maul you, as soon as you climb in. The brain just can’t tell the difference between a real physical threat like that gorilla on the bed and this perceived threat, which is wakefulness. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. It’s funny because I had no problem if we’re on the couch watching a movie and I’d doze off, that’d be okay. Or sometimes when I meditate I can easily fall asleep. But when it comes to real bedtime and then putting your head on that pillow, it’s like your heart starts to pump and then your brain just starts going. So that’s so true. It’s interesting how that all works. But yeah. Martin Reed: It really is interesting. I agree with you. And again, it just comes down to that, the brain looking out for us really. So before, to use your example, let’s say you’re watching TV earlier in the evening, you know it’s not time to go to bed. So you’re not trying to make sleep happen. You’re not trying to avoid being awake at night. There’s no effort, there’s no pressure. So you really feel that sense of sleepiness when it’s time to go to bed. It’s okay, you flipped that switch. Now you’re donning that suit of armor. It’s battle time. I’ve got to avoid being awake. I’ve got to make sure I fall asleep in a certain amount of time. I’ve got to make sure I don’t wake up. All this pressure that we are putting on ourselves and the brain’s trying its hardest to protect us. We’re probably not going to feel sleepy. It’s like anytime we’re going into battle, we’re not going to feel sleepy. It’s really, we want to get to a point where we’re just dropping that battle, which is hard to do. Because all of our instincts are telling us, avoid this wakefulness, we need sleep to happen. It feels so good to get that sleep. It feels so good to have those thoughts that you can sleep and not to deal with all these thoughts that it’s going to be another one of those nights. But the more we struggle with sleep and those thoughts and feelings, unfortunately the more we get tangled up in that struggle and that battle. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Martin Reed: So let’s talk about some of the stuff that you did and was the reason why we’re talking today. I don’t have a set list or anything. I’d love to just hear your thoughts on things that you did find helpful, that helped you over the longer term. Maybe were really difficult in the short term, but actually proved to be helpful over the longer term. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, like I said before, I found your podcast and started listening to that one lady and then that led me to listening to the other ones too. And in general I found a common pattern and it’s like I wasn’t the only one and it’s everyone out there and most of these people are chronic insomniacs, right? So then I went into more research around your podcast and the stuff that you do, the work that you did. And then I signed up for your emails, which then you started sending me the day one to day seven daily emails, which were really good, helpful tips. So that combined with the podcast, I started to realize some more things and then I had a really good psychologist that I go to. So I started talking to her. And then she also had some live, in-person workshops, not around insomnia but just around anxiety and worry, which is closely related. And just really getting out there to talk to someone really helped. And a group of people too that she hosted was really helpful. Just to have people that are in the same path and in the same boat really helps just to even talk about it. And then you also mentioned a lot about CBT-I, which is the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And I got help with that too. But yeah, just really at the end of the day, you can get all these tools, but you just have to work on it yourself too. When it comes to nighttime, that’s the hardest part. It was difficult, not going to lie, but it’s short-term pain, long-term gain. The idea of, or the thought of not being able to sleep still, I still think about it every night just because it’s just been this ingrained neural path in my brain that’s stayed with me or been with me for maybe 25 years now. But the key is you just relearn that if I actually let go, I can fall asleep. And if I don’t, I’m still going to function and I’m still going to be that mother that can take care of my kids. It’s not going to be the end of the world. I’m not going to accidentally kill them. Your brain is really good at thinking catastrophically. You just make it so bad or seem like it’s going to be so bad. But really when you’re actually doing it the next day, it’s like, yeah, you’re going to feel drowsy and maybe not at your best, but you’re not just going to be at your worst. So those tips really helped a lot. Martin Reed: Yeah. And that catastrophizing, what’s the brain doing there is just trying to look out for you, always wants to present the worst case scenario just to make sure that you listen and that we take steps to avoid that from happening. And sometimes, well probably most of the time, that’s really helpful. We’re going to cross the street, make sure you look both ways. What if you get mowed down, your family’s all going to starve, then you’re not going to be there for them, et cetera, et cetera. And it makes us look both ways. Great. Thanks brain. But when it comes to stuff like sleep that we have no control over, those thoughts can be really difficult and we can easily get really tangled up in them and believe that they’re 100% true. Think of them as facts, think of them as a reflection of who we are. Think of them as an obstacle to the kind of person we want to be. But the truth is, it’s just the brain looking out for us. And sometimes just acknowledging that, sometimes just really simply just being like, okay, thanks brain. Thanks for looking out for me. And just letting that sit, not trying to push it away, not trying to tell the brain, don’t try and protect me, don’t try and look out for me, but just let that thought just sit next to you. Just redirect your focus and your attention elsewhere. And you said letting go, just to clarify, by letting go, do you just mean dropping that struggle, trying to push or avoid certain thoughts or feelings or? I’d just like to hear your thoughts more on what you mean by that, and if someone’s listening that’s like, yeah, I’d love to let go. How do I do that? Vicky Chiu: Yeah, no, that’s a great question actually. For me, when I start to feel that anxiety, which I still do on some days, there’s just one of those days, maybe once a week I’ll get that, I can’t sleep, I have a big day tomorrow. So when I start to feel that during bedtime, I would just let it in. I would try to feel it. Be like, okay, like talking to your brain, but okay, anxiety, thank you for warning me, thank you for coming in and dropping in. And before when I felt so anxious, it was that right away feeling like, oh my God, I need this to go, right? But now it’s like, you still want to do that, but instead you just invite it and just be like, okay, let me feel all the anxiety right now, just to accept it. And then when you do, it feels heard or seen or something. And then it’s like, oh, okay, well she’s listening to me and now I can let go. So for me, that’s how the process works, is just to feel it and stop pushing it away because the more you resist, the harder it comes through. So yeah, just to accept it and then it just eases out and that’s when you can let it go. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, let me ask this. Do you find that when you’re really caught up in really anxious thoughts and feelings, you mentioned that in the past you even experienced panic attacks. Do you find that when we’re really experiencing a lot of anxiety, it feels like it’s just going to get more and more intense, right? It’s just going to keep ratcheting up and getting worse and worse and worse until something awful happens. But in reality, and sometimes it can be helpful to just recognize this, that it does eventually reach a plateau. It’s like a wave in the ocean. That wave can grow and grow and grow and it looks like it’s just going to wash over you and take you down. But eventually it does recede a little bit. This wave can’t grow indefinitely. It does get really high and then fall again. And then sure it might come back and get a little bit higher or get almost as high, but then it goes down again. But do you think it’s helpful just recognizing and acknowledging that this is starting to feel really unpleasant, but maybe I can just ride it out. As long as I can try and let go and just drop that struggle, sooner or later that wave is going to reach its maximum height and it will start to fall back down again? Vicky Chiu: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s exactly what I do by accepting it and riding the wave. It’s just the more you just let it do its thing, it will come down eventually. And for me, it’s always came down. It’s like this too shall pass like everyone says. So yeah, and I do now for sure get out of bed when I do feel anxious. So my brain does not relate my bed as a place of anxiety. So I’ll just get out of bed and go to my little meditation place and just sit there for a little bit and just ride that out. But once I’m out of that bed and I let myself feel all the emotions or anxiety, things tend to calm down and sometimes it may not. I’ll try that whole cycle maybe 2, 3, 4 or five times a night. But I’ll just repeat that whole cycle again and again and just get out of bed, ride it out, get out of bed, ride it out, go back to bed kind of thing. So that’s the technique now. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think if nothing else, the reason why I like this idea of just getting out of bed when it doesn’t feel good to be in bed is it just gives us the opportunity to make being awake, we’re awake anyway, it just gives you that opportunity to make being awake a bit more pleasant. So instead of just being engaged in that battle of trying to make sleep happen, tossing and turning all that unpleasantness, how about we just do something that makes being awake more pleasant. That not only makes being awake a little bit more tolerable, but again, it comes back to training the brain that, oh, maybe being awake isn’t a danger. Maybe it’s not this physical threat that it might be because you’re actually enjoying this wakefulness. So maybe I don’t have to be quite so alert to protect you from being awake at night. And that in turn, obviously creates better conditions for sleep to happen. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Martin Reed: Yeah. So I love that we’ve talked a lot about this letting go and dealing with that anxiety. Again, I think people listening to this are going to be, yeah that makes total sense. Maybe they’ve tried this, I’ve tried allowing this worry, this anxiety to happen, but still struggling with it, still finding sleep difficult. I think it’s helpful to emphasize that this is a whole new way of developing a relationship with our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions. And so I think it takes time. It’s not just going to be, all right, I’m really struggling tonight. Okay, I’m going to allow these thoughts, these feelings, and then suddenly we feel better or suddenly we fall asleep. I’d just like to hear your experience a little bit more on that process. Was there a lot of practice? Was it really challenging? How long was it taking you to notice a change in the effect of difficult thoughts on how you felt and how you slept? Vicky Chiu: Yeah. On my end with my experience, it took a longer time just because I had also goals of tapering off the pill. And so it started in September. I went to seek help around November and then I didn’t actually get medical help until December-ish, and it was just the slow process of trying to accept each idea one at a time. So it would be like letting go would be a big one. But then that aside, I was always taking the pill too just to… So the sleep doctor that I was talking to was like, don’t try to just do everything all at once because that might be a huge stress on you just to sleep and that’s not what we want. So we did little baby steps at a time and the longest one was just trying to taper off the sleeping pill, which it was a good technique but it took long. It would be like, find one night in this whole week that you think or you just try without the sleeping pill. So it’d be maybe more a weekend where I can have a really bad night of sleep or no sleep at all, and then I’ll be okay because I’ve got my partner around to take care of the kids or whatever. And then if I’m confident for one night a week, then I would move on to the next week, which would be two nights in the week where I’m going to try no sleeping pill. But it’s not every week I would jump or go to three and four or five nights. If I’m only confident at two, I would stick to two nights every week until I built that confidence and then I’ll go to three nights. So that dragged for a long time until, I don’t know, it suddenly happened that there was one night I forgot even to take it when I was supposed to because they make you track stuff on a worksheet and I didn’t really track it anymore and then I forgot about it and then I woke up the next morning, I was very happy that I was able to just even forget. And now I’ve developed this thought that, or realization maybe, we should call that, is when I do take the pill it will take the worries in whatever away and the trying and the anxiety. But when I wake up in the morning, I feel just as crappy as maybe having no sleep. I was like, it’s not worth it. It’s kind of the same, if I’m not going to sleep good tonight or take it, I’m going to feel the same the next day. So I just decided not to. Sometimes you even feel better if you have a poor nights sleep without the pill I realized. Martin Reed: I love how we’ve talked about all these thought processes and that it’s difficult and that it takes time and that we’ve talked about when you come from a place where you’ve been taking medication for a long time, that there’s also another journey. It’s another challenge to move away from that. You touched upon the behavioral side of things in terms of getting out of bed to do something more appealing if being in bed doesn’t feel good. Something that a lot of people with chronic insomnia can do in a bid to chase sleep or make sleep happen is just spending a lot more time in bed than maybe they ever did in the past. So we might go to bed earlier because we just feel really fatigued and we want more sleep to happen. So we might go to bed earlier or stay in bed later in the morning and often that’s one of these things that can actually perpetuate the sleep disruption because we end up going to bed before we’re sleepy enough for sleep. We can stay in bed in the morning all different times, which can be disruptive to our body clock. And if we get out late in the morning, get out of bed late in the morning, we’re going to be awake for less time during the day to build up that sleep drive to help us sleep the following night. So we see often it’s suggested to a lot, a little bit less time for sleep, spend an amount of time in bed that’s a bit closer to what your current circumstances are, the amount of sleep you’re currently averaging. Was this something that was relevant to you in your experience or was it a change that you made? I’m curious to hear your thoughts and experience with that. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, it was very relevant. I was told the same thing is to sleep around the time you are sleepy, because everyone has their natural biological clock for sleeping and waking up. And we had to figure out when my sleep time was and when my awake time was. And it was a bit more of a strict plan at first because it’s trying to train the brain, do some new things and to adapt. So it was for me, sleep around 11 and then would wake up at around 6:30. And I say strict because I would do that on the weekends as well for a little bit, I don’t know, until I was just used to it. But yeah, the sleep doctors also told me, you still have to live your life and you’re going to have those weekends where people are coming over or you’re going over to a friend’s house or we have parties and weddings and all that stuff. So those things need to be okay too in your life. Because if you stick with this strict plan, then that’s going to start to stress you out if you have other things in life that come in. And that is exactly what I was thinking and I had that question on my mind too. Like, well if this is my life, then it would suck, right? I’m going to be missing out on stuff. But at first it’ll be a little bit strict or at least it was for me. And then after it’s like, once that confidence came in and the routine was like, I can actually do this then it really worked. Martin Reed: What you said there is really helpful because it can be helpful or useful at first to have a more strict routine. I’m not going to allow myself to go to bed for example before 11 o’clock. So I want to make sure that I’m really sufficiently sleepy enough for sleep to happen and I want to try and make sure that I’m always out of bed around the same time every day in the morning to help anchor my biological body clock and to make sure that I’m giving my body enough time awake during the day to help build that sleepiness for the next night. But at the same time, we don’t want it to interfere with our life because ultimately what we do with our life, our actions are way more influential over the kind of life we live than how we sleep. It’s really what we do. So we don’t want to be like, oh I can’t go out with friends tonight because I’m not going to be able to go to bed at a certain time. I’m not going to be able to do all this stuff that makes my life meaningful and rich because it might interfere with the plan or with the schedule. So I think it can be helpful in the short term, maybe be a little bit stricter just to get those early results, to start feeling that really strong sense of sleepiness, which can actually be really reassuring when that returns because we can just be so used to that feeling of fatigue, just grogginess and feeling worn down, which isn’t the same as sleepiness. When that sense of sleepiness comes back, it can be really reassuring. And when we notice all the improvements, then we can be a little bit less strict with ourselves and just be like, I’ll aim to make sure I’m not going to bed before a certain time, but if I feel really sleepy before then, I’ll allow myself to go to bed then. If it’s the weekend, maybe I’ll allow myself to sleep in for half an hour or an hour. I think that’s a good process to follow. And it sounds like that’s what you found to be helpful for yourself. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, I’ve just been a lot more lenient in, especially weekends, be like I can sleep in a bit more. It would be the one hour sleep in more. And again, it’s that confidence. I can sleep tonight and if I don’t, everyone has a bad night of sleep. Even the sleepers or people that are good sleepers, everyone has bad… That’s just natural. There’s nothing wrong with that and you just have to learn to accept that. And if you do have a bad night of sleep, you’re not going to not function. You can still function. So yeah, that’s reassuring. Martin Reed: Yeah. Even when it feels like we just can’t function, even the most basic level, we can still breathe, we can still drink water, we can still eat. So it just comes down to, it’s that brain again, right? It’s just trying so hard to look out for us. It’s like, look, you got to make this, this has got to be fixed. We’re not going to be able to do anything. But the truth of the matter is, the brain tells us one thing, but we can still do other things. Our brain could tell us, don’t lift up your right hand, but we can still lift up our right hand. We still get to choose how we respond to all that stuff the brain is generating, but it takes practice. It’s really hard to separate ourselves from those thought processes because they can feel they are just so intense and they just feel so genuine and it’s so easy to just have that wave crash over us and just sweep us away. It really does take a lot of practice to change that relationship I think. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, absolutely. It’s not an easy fix, but it is fixable. Martin Reed: Are you telling me that you never have any difficult nights anymore? Vicky Chiu: No, I’m not saying that. For sure not. Even just last night it was difficult. I think at least there’s still one night out of the week where it’s not very bad, but I won’t get the ideal amount of sleep that I wanted, and it happens. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think it’s so important to just recognize that we all have difficult nights from time to time. So it’s a loaded question because I was secretly hoping that you were going to be honest and say that, yeah, I do still difficult nights from time to time because everyone does. I think what the change is, what the difference is, is your reaction to it. So instead of it being the default reaction, which is trying to battle with all those stressful thoughts and the anxiety that the brain is generating to try and help you out, changing our behaviors during the day, maybe canceling plans as a result and really getting caught up, tangled up in the struggle, what’s tonight going to bring? All that stuff. The transformation happens when you realize that okay, I’ve had this difficult night or I’m having this difficult night. There are things I can do in response. So during the night I can do something a bit more appealing. If it doesn’t feel good to be in bed during the day, I don’t have to use all of my energy trying to push all these thoughts and emotions away. I can just let them sit and hang out for as long as they want whilst I still engage in doing stuff that helps me just live the kind of life I want to live. I think when we get to that point, that’s when we’ve truly put everything behind us and are whole. I just don’t think chronic insomnia can just no longer exist once we get to that point. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. And that’s a good point too about the schedule and stuff the next day. Something that was very important to me was not to do that, like not to cancel anything. If you had no sleep at all, say the night before and you had a whole calendar of stuff to do, just don’t cancel it. It’s still going to happen. I can still push through this. Makes a huge difference, because if you start canceling stuff, then that creates another load of anxiety at nighttime, then your brain associates, oh I have a big thing tomorrow, I must sleep. But then you’re not going to because you have a big thing tomorrow. So it’s like that spiral again. So I’ve learned to like, okay, I’m just going to deal with whatever I need to do the next day and it’s going to be hard, but whatever. And so now it’s all good again. Martin Reed: That’s one of those big changes that we can get to is just recognizing that, this week I would much rather be asleep. Nobody wants to be awake during the night. But just recognizing that that is out of our control. What do we still have control over? We still have control over our actions. So we can still do that stuff during the day. No doubt it’s probably going to be more difficult, it’s going to require more energy, but we can still do those things. When we’re faced with a struggle, we really only have two choices that we can make. We can give up, withdraw from life, move away from the kind of life we want to live, or we can recognize what we don’t have control over, focus on what we do have control over and still commit. I think it does take a commitment to doing those things that are important to us, that help us move toward the kind of life we want to live. They might not feel as good. They might be more difficult because we’re not feeling as good as we otherwise might. But the most important thing is just that we are doing them. And I think that really is just so important. Vicky Chiu: Yeah, absolutely. And just a little side note that I’ve… from this whole insomnia experience and being alone by myself at night really brought me to my spiritual side. So now I’m more like, well what is this? Why is this problem laid on me? What am I learning from this? And instead of why is this happening to me, it’s not fair being the victim, it’s like, well what is the gift on the other side? And I truly think a gift is just to share it and have someone listen to my story and be able to relate to it. So yeah, that was another big, aha moment I had at nighttime. Martin Reed: I’ve heard similar things like that before where people just feel once they’ve made this transformation that we’ve been talking about, where they actually can reflect back and think, I don’t necessarily think this had a 100% negative impact on my life. I think there might have actually been some good to it. This is probably sounding crazy to many people listening, how can any of this be good or have a positive side? But once we get to that point, we’re able to reflect back. I think the experience can change us perhaps in a way that can be really life enhancing for the future. Vicky Chiu: Yeah. For me at least, it definitely made me stronger mentally and definitely made me see the gift that was hidden. It was hard. I was the victim. I had all of that and I was depressed and it was hard, but at the end, I truly received it as a gift. Martin Reed: All right. Well Vicky, I’m really grateful for the time that you’ve spent with us today. I know that lots of people are going to find this discussion really helpful, but I do have one last question for you. It’s the same question I ask everyone at the end of these discussions, and it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help and they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Vicky Chiu: I would have to say that I’ve definitely been there and I thought that there was no help for me and I felt lonely. But I would say and tell them that they’re definitely not alone because the theory that was taught by you, Martin, the Insomnia Coach, is something that really works. The cognitive and the brain and all of that stuff is that’s the key. And there’s plenty of help out there. And talk about it. Talk about your problems. Sometimes, like for me, I felt shameful at times, or everyone has good sleep. I’m the only one out there, so I shouldn’t really burden them with my problems. So the key is to seek help, I think. And I took from this experience as a lesson, again, I was destined to learn something about me. And yeah, there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Martin Reed: That’s great. I think that’s a positive note to end on. So thanks again for taking the time out your day to come onto the podcast, Vicky. Vicky Chiu: Thanks, and you’re doing wonderful work. You’re sharing other people’s story, which is amazing and I’m very grateful for you for that. Martin Reed: Thank you so much. Vicky Chiu: Thanks Martin. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Jim struggled with insomnia for over 10 years. At first, he thought it was a symptom of heavy drinking, a poor diet, working late, and experiencing a lot of stress. However, the insomnia stuck around even after Jim addressed these issues. This led to many years of ongoing sleep disruption, fear, frustration, and anxiety. In this episode, Jim shares the changes he made that helped him put his insomnia behind him. Instead of chasing after sleep, he began to spend less time in bed and always got out of bed at the same time every day. He started to get out of bed at night instead of staring at the ceiling for hours. Instead of spending time before bed doing things in an attempt to make sleep happen, he simply set aside some time to unwind and do things that were relaxing and enjoyable. Ultimately, Jim stopped trying to fight or avoid nighttime wakefulness. He stopped trying to fight or avoid the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with nighttime wakefulness. Today, Jim knows that he can still enjoy really good nights of sleep — even after the most stressful days — because he is no longer engaged in a competition with sleep. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Jim. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Jim Evans: Hey Martin, thanks for having me. Really appreciate the opportunity. Martin Reed: Well, let’s start right at the beginning. If you can just tell us a little bit more about when your sleep problems first began, and what you think caused those initial issues with sleep. Jim Evans: Yeah, so I’ve had sleep problems for probably the last decade. It really was alcohol. I was a heavy drinker. In fact, you could say I was a high functioning alcoholic. Caffeine. When I wasn’t drinking alcohol, I was drinking caffeinated beverages. I drank coffee for a number of years. And then when I quit coffee, I went over to some black tea and green tea, and even when I was drinking tea, I was really drinking too much of it. The other contributing factor was diet. I was eating standard American diet, was snacking all the time, and was even eating before I would go to bed. I would have a late night snack before I would go to bed, and I didn’t really even realize what impact that was having on my sleep. I was working a lot of late hours, had a lot of stress in my life. Still do occasionally have stress in my life, but it’s not as bad now. And then, a lot of bad sleep habits that I acquired over the years. I found myself trying to jump into bed early and stay into bed late, trying to grab naps. The sleep wasn’t really bad right away. It probably took me about a decade for my sleep to become completely dysfunctional, and at the worst, I was taking sleeping pills with alcohol. I think that was probably the lowest point of my life, in terms of trying to get a good night’s rest. Martin Reed: And so, what was sleep like for you during this period? Was it difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep? A bit of both? Was there ever an average kind of night? Jim Evans: Yeah, I guess I would say I sucked at all aspects of sleep. I would lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. I would tell people that was a hobby of mine, as I would be laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to fall asleep. When I did get to sleep, I would often wake up. I remember the 2:00 hour, for some reason, I would wake up at 2:00 every night. And I knew when I would wake up that the chances of me falling back asleep were pretty rare. And then, I would wake up earlier than when I wanted, before the alarm went off. And I just, I felt like the only thing I was really getting was just light sleep. I was spending 10 hours in bed, approximately 10 hours in bed, but I was probably sleeping five or six of those hours at best. And eventually, I got to the point where I was having great anxiety about sleep, which created more sleep issues. There were times that I was afraid to jump in bed because I knew it was just going to be a frustrating night of me trying to compete against sleep, and I would wake up frustrated, and I didn’t know what to do about it. And this went on for many, many, many years. Martin Reed: Yeah. You kind of touched upon it a little bit, in terms of the anxiety there, but were you also finding that this sleep disruption was also having an effect on your days, like in your daily life? And if so, what kind of influence was that having for you? Jim Evans: Yeah. I was experiencing things like short term memory loss, lack of ability to focus, fatigue and tiredness in the afternoon. I’m a part-time athlete, so I’m an endurance athlete, and so I spend a lot of time road biking and swimming and doing things like in strength training. And I just found I wasn’t recovering from those activities, and I just didn’t feel myself. And I knew sleep was the cause, because occasionally I would’ve a good night’s sleep. What would happen is, I would’ve three or four nights of really horrible sleep, and that would build up, and then I would just basically pass out one evening and get maybe a good, solid six or seven hours. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen often enough. But then, on those days when I got a good quality sleep, I felt really good. So, I knew sleep was kind of the cause of all of the daytime disorders that I was experiencing. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, before you found Insomnia Coach, what kind of things had you tried in a bid to just improve your sleep, improve your situation and struggle? Jim Evans: Yeah, so, obviously I tried a lot of Google therapy. Martin Reed: Yeah. Jim Evans: And I would just try the little things that I thought were the cause. I would try to resolve those issues. I went to a couple sleep doctors. The first sleep doc doctor I went to prescribed me Ambien. I can’t even remember the dosage of it. But I took that for a number of years, but to be honest with you, I never liked the effects of it. But it worked, partially. It partially worked. So I would take Ambien, and then the next day I felt sluggish almost the entire day. And I think, I don’t know why I continued to take it. I guess I really didn’t have another solution, and so I was able to sleep pretty okay. Not great, but pretty okay. Take an Ambien. Over the years, I had gone to probably three different sleep doctors. I also had a sleep study that was done. They brought me into a hotel room, hooked me up to a monitor. They actually hook you with diodes all over your body, and then they’re like, “Okay, we want you to go to sleep now.” And you’re like, “How am I supposed to sleep with all this equipment, with like, two or three video cameras looking out over me to watch me?” And of course I didn’t sleep, you know? And so, it kind of ruined the whole point of the exercise. But I think I did sleep like an hour and a half, and afterwards they gave me a diagnosis of… What was it? I’ve got this written down here. I can’t remember. Yeah. I don’t remember what the diagnosis was, but basically it was like a psychological sleep disorder that indicated that I really was asleep when I thought I was awake, which basically to me meant that I slept really lightly. They didn’t find any breathing disorders or any other type of sleep dysfunctions. Oh, I just remembered. Yeah, the sleep study was paradoxical insomnia, is what they prescribed me with. I had to Google it to find out what that meant. Yeah. And when the sleep study was over, they actually indicated I was sleeping parts of it, but I remember, I remember distinctly some of the thoughts that I had while I was supposedly asleep, and I told them, I said, “I was just meditating.” They said, “No, your heart rate was really low.” And I said, “Well, my normal resting heart rate is between 35 and 40.” I said, “So if you’re going to go by that, then I guess I’m asleep right now talking to you.” So, I went from sleep doctor to sleep doctor. Really didn’t find any solutions. And then, I finally came upon another sleep doctor that basically said, “You should give cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia a try,” and that’s kind of how I wound up finding you. Martin Reed: Yeah. And it’s interesting just hearing you talk about all these things you tried and the experience that you went through, because I think a lot of people are going to really resonate with what you’re saying, because when we’re struggling, we want to look for a solution to the problem, right? And when it comes to sleep, we often, from person to person, we all do very similar things, and a lot of it is grounded in medication or supplements, the kind of sleep hygiene, like changing our bedtime rituals or developing new rituals. And all these things really, over the long term at least, aren’t usually that helpful, just because they don’t really get to the root cause of what is feeding the insomnia, what’s keeping that insomnia alive. And often, it is related to our behaviors and our thought processes, our relationship with our thoughts. I don’t think it’s our thoughts themselves, because we all experience thoughts. Some are pleasant, some are unpleasant, but often it’s our reaction to those thoughts, that temptation to try and fight or avoid the really difficult and uncomfortable ones, that then just kind of serve to make them push back harder, lead to more arousal and create more difficult conditions for sleep to happen. I’m curious, just after I gave that little spiel, if any of that, looking back in your experience, if that sounds as though it’s something you identify with. Jim Evans: Yeah. I mean, I tried all those things that you talked about, and you’re right. Identifying the root cause is totally essential. I mean, I think, unfortunately, with sleep it’s complex, and sometimes people have multiple root causes. I mean, I look back over the years, and based on what I was just telling your listeners and viewers and you is that I had many root causes. I mean, I had alcohol abuse, caffeine, diet, poor sleep habits, just poor eating, and even eating before bedtime. I had to resolve all of those. But I guess, once I fixed all of those, though, I figured that my sleep would also improve, and unfortunately the root cause of that was really that I needed to retrain my brain, is that my sleep habits had gotten so sloppy that I needed to really retrain myself on how to sleep, because I was laying in bed and I wasn’t sleeping efficiently, and I wasn’t following a good structured sleep habit. So even though I cleaned up all other aspects of my life that would normally contribute to good sleep, until I fixed that single root cause, I wasn’t going to be able to address the issue. Martin Reed: Yeah. And that is basically insomnia, chronic insomnia at least, in a nutshell, because we have these triggers for sleep disruption. We can never eliminate them all. Some we might be able to, but never all of them. There’s probably billions of them, that can all just temporarily disrupt our sleep for as long as they’re relevant, or as long as they’re an issue. But once they’re no longer an issue, whether that’s because we were able to eliminate those triggers, or if we’ve just kind of adapted to them, if the sleep issues stick around, it’s always because of these perpetuating factors, these things like our behaviors, our relationship with our thoughts. And so, that can also sometimes be this area of mystery or additional concern, because we can think, well, look, I’ve got rid of this. Let’s say I had a really stressful job, and I think that’s why I’m struggling to sleep. I’ve left that job now. I’ve got a really good job. I’m really happy. I love it. I’m chilled out, relaxed. I love going in, but my sleep issues have stuck around. Now I’m really concerned, because does this mean something’s wrong? Something’s broken with me, because my sleep issues are still here, yet what was causing the sleep issues has gone? But that’s normal, and it is down to these perpetuating factors behind insomnia. I like to say they give insomnia the oxygen it needs to survive, even when that trigger is no longer around anymore. And it’s down to those behaviors that we completely understandably implement in a bid to improve sleep. Like you touched upon, we might start chasing sleep, going to bed earlier, staying in bed later, just spending a lot more time for sleep. We might be changing our days and our routines around to try and protect our sleep, or to conserve energy, to protect us from that sense of fatigue. And we really can be tempted to get involved in that endless and exhausting battle with all the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are being generated by our brain in a bid to protect us. It’s looking out for us, but it’s just trying so hard that it’s kind of getting in the way. And these are all the things that keep that insomnia going long after whatever initially triggered it is no longer around. Jim Evans: Yeah, and you begin to feel helpless, because you’re chasing all these things, but you don’t really know which one of it is that’s contributing to sleep. I mean, for the longest time I thought stress was a big factor in whether I was going to sleep or not. And stress used to be one of the triggers. If I had a stressful day, it was very difficult for me to sleep. But when I started to go through your program, I would notice that I could have a horrendously stressful day and still sleep pretty decently, so I started to realize, while stress is a contributing factor, it’s not really the underlying cause of why I’m not sleeping. And then, you’ve got to figure out, you got to really address those structural sleep issues that you’re dealing with, and that’s what I found to be successful. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, let’s talk about that a little bit more. When we were working together, what changes did you make, that on reflection now, you’re like, yeah, they were really helpful? Jim Evans: Well, the sleep restriction was honestly the most helpful thing. I could not have solved my sleep problem without going through sleep restriction. And I don’t think of it as sleep restriction. I think more of it as a gaining efficiency with sleep, or restructuring sleep. Sleep restriction is, the term almost doesn’t describe truly what it’s doing for you. And over time, well, you saw the results. Every day that I did this, I got better and better at sleep, and toward the end of the eight week program, I was sleeping pretty efficiently. So, that was one of the things that was super helpful. The other was a sleep buffer, the idea of having to 30-minute to a one-hour period of time to unwind, and I find that time to be extremely important. I’ve experimented with different things during that sleep buffer, some that I found successful and some not so successful. Like I think I told you, when I was going through your program at first, I was meditating during my sleep buffer, and I’ve stopped doing that. The reason why is because what happened was, my brain would start to associate meditation with sleep, and so then I would try to meditate at work and I’d fall asleep. And so, that wasn’t a good thing. I didn’t want my brain to associate meditation with sleep, and so I discontinued that. I find reading to be really peaceful and relaxing, and so, lower the lights a little bit, grab a good book and just read. Or sometimes I’ll just sit in a darkened room and just kind of relax, and I find that to be helpful as well. But to be honest with you, I’ve had nights where I’ve watched TV up until the moment I go to bed, and I’ve slept perfectly well. And so, I think sleep buffer helps. I notice I do sleep better with sleep buffer, but I go back to sleep restriction, and talking about sleep restriction, the important thing there is going to bed at the same time every single night, waking up at the same time in the next morning. And I think the more important of the two is waking up at the same time every morning. So in other words, there will be times when I go to bed at, for whatever reason, if I get together with friends or something, I may go to bed at midnight, and that’s okay if I do that occasionally, but I still have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, which is my wake up time. And so, no matter what, if I go to a rock concert, or I get together with friends, or have insomnia for some reason, you never extend that wake up time beyond 5:30 in the morning. The other thing I found to be hugely important was looking at the bed in a very different light. I had anxiety before when I would look at the bed, because I had this very dysfunctional view of it and sleep in general. And so, now the bed is only for sleeping, and so I don’t… I used to lay in bed. I used to eat in bed. I used to read in bed, and I don’t do any of those things anymore. I don’t even sit on the bed anymore. So, if I’m in the bedroom and want to sit somewhere, I’ll sit beside the bed. I won’t sit on it, because I just want my mind to associate that bed with the place where I sleep. The other thing that’s kind of helpful too is, if I know I’m going to have insomnia for some reason is just, if lay in bed for like a half hour, 45 minutes, and I know I’m not getting to sleep, I get out of bed, and then I’ll go read, or I’ll go sit in the living room. Sometimes I’ll even watch TV. And then when I feel tired again, I’ll go jump back in bed. So, those are the techniques that you taught me, and honestly all of them have been hugely successful, because I’ve been insomnia-free for like a year now, and I think I’ve only, within that whole year, I’m still surprised to say this, but within that year, I think there’s, probably can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve had insomnia. And I don’t even remember when they were. There’s times of maybe sleepless nights, and maybe that’s not insomnia, where I don’t sleep as well, but then the next evening, I’m able to sleep again. So, those are the things that have really helped. I think the sleep restriction though, if I wouldn’t have done the sleep restriction and really restructured the sleep, I probably would not have been as successful. Martin Reed: Yeah. There’s so much great stuff there, and I think that last point you made, yeah, still, I can remember that I’ve had a few difficult nights over the past year. I can’t really remember when they happened though, or anything else about them. I think that’s important, because it’s normal and natural to have some difficult nights from time to time. That’s just part of being a human being. But what changes is our relationship with them, our reaction to them. Now they’re not this huge, difficult, challenging, painful influence on our life anymore. They’re just, oh, I’ve had a difficult night. That’s in the past. Just our relationship with those difficult nights when they happen just completely changes. We can never eliminate difficult nights from time to time. There’s always going to be some difficult nights, just as there’s always going to be some difficult days, but it’s just our relationship just completely changes. When we’ve put insomnia behind us, it just has far less of an effect on our life, and that’s really what our ultimate goal is, I think. That’s where the transformation happens, when we’re kind of okay with those difficult nights happening, then they tend to happen really infrequently compared to when we’re really determined and really desperate, almost, to avoid them. That’s when they’re more likely to happen. Jim Evans: Yeah. I don’t get anxiety anymore. If I have a sleepless night, it doesn’t bother me, because I just have confidence now that my brain knows how to sleep, and I know that, okay, so I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. I only slept four hours last night. I know I’ll sleep good the next night. And that’s huge, having that confidence. Martin Reed: I read something recently that says, about sleep confidence, and it was like, we don’t need to have confidence in our ability to sleep. If you ask someone who sleeps well, how confident are you about sleep? They’ll probably give you this kind of blank, confused stare. We don’t need to be confident to sleep. We just need to be awake for long enough and sleep will always happen. And the more we try to either feel confident, or the more we try to make sleep happen, or the more we try to feel a certain way or think certain thoughts, that’s when we tend to get trapped, tangled up in that struggle, you know? Jim Evans: Yeah. No, that makes sense. But I think, when you’re an insomniac and you haven’t and you haven’t slept well in like half a decade or a decade, you need to build some of that confidence and some successes before you can get to that point where you can sleep successfully again, because sleep is, you associate sleep with this negative event, and it’s not a good thing. You get into that bad mindset associated with sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think you made a great point as well, when you talked about sleep restriction, about it’s awful terminology, and I completely agree with you, because it sounds like we are restricting sleep, like we’re taking sleep away from you. But really, what we’re doing is, we are trying to take long periods of wakefulness away from you, just because so many of us, when we are struggling with chronic insomnia, we are spending more time in bed, and there’s a big gap between the amount of sleep we’re generally getting and the amount of time we’re allotting for sleep. So we are kind of, almost in a way, setting ourselves up for long periods of wakefulness. So, with sleep restriction, all we’re doing is just trying to more closely match the amount of time we spend in bed, or the amount of time we set aside for sleep to happen, so that’s more closely aligned with how much sleep we’re getting at the current time, in our current reality, but with a little bit of time added on, just because we all spend a little bit of time awake. No one generally falls asleep as soon as their head hits the pillow, and we all spend a little bit of time awake during the night. So, sleep restriction can sound really scary, because it sounds like we’re taking even more sleep away, but really what we’re doing is we’re just creating conditions to help take some of that wakefulness away, whilst also just building up more of that natural biological sleep drive, which occurs the longer that we are awake, the stronger that drive, the stronger that pressure for sleep to happen. And what’s also helpful with that sleep restriction is it kind of gives us an earliest possible bedtime and a final out of bedtime in the morning. And like you said, that final out of bed time is probably way more important than the front end, than the bedtime. That’s why I like to think of the start of our sleep window just as an earliest possible bedtime. So, we don’t go to bed before then, but we might not even go to bed at the start of the sleep window if we don’t feel sleepy enough for sleep, because a clock doesn’t know when we’re sleepy enough for sleep. We might want to be living our lives. We might be out socializing with friends, as you touched upon. But if we can try and stick close to that out of bed time in the morning, that can just be good as a kind of anchor, as a reference point for our body clock, that consistent out of bed time in the morning. It stops us from that temptation to chase after sleep, and if we’re always getting out of bed around the same time in the morning, it ensures that we’re giving ourselves lots of time during the day, lots of wakefulness to build up that sleep drive to help with sleep the following night. So, that’s where that sleep restriction can be helpful, but totally agree with you that the terminology is terrible. Jim Evans: Yeah. And I was just thinking, in terms of the wake time, it helps set that biological clock, because what I’ve noticed over time is that now I wake up one or two minutes now before my alarm goes off, and I feel like I’ve got enough energy to go through the day. Whereas before, when the alarm clock went off, I would hit the snooze button multiple times, and my body didn’t associate that alarm going off, or my wake time is the time that I needed to be up and active. And so, having the same wake up time every day has just been huge, because my body knows, look, it’s 5:30. It’s time for you to get up. It’s time for you to begin your day. And I don’t even need to set an alarm. I do, but I don’t recall the last time I actually got up to the alarm. I always get up a few minutes in advance of it. And even if I’m only getting four hours of sleep a night, because I stayed up late or something, still, my body wakes up at 5:30 now. Martin Reed: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. I like how you touched upon something as well with that kind of wind down time that you give yourself in the evening, how really, listening to you talk about that, what struck me was the fact that you got to this place where maybe at first you were kind of doing things in an effort to try and make sleep happen or to make sleep more likely, to make yourself feel relaxed and sleepy. But you got to a point where it was just time for you. Time for you to just do stuff that you found relaxing and enjoyable, whether that’s reading or whether it’s watching TV. And I think that’s important to emphasize, because when we talk about taking time to wind down, it can push us into this area of rituals and sleep efforts, where we are engaged in all this stuff to try and make sleep happen. And anytime we do that, anytime we engage in effort around sleep, we make conditions for sleep less favorable. Really, our only goal is to just give ourselves some me time before we go to bed, just some time to unwind and just do stuff that we find relaxing and enjoyable. It’s not something that’s going to make sleep happen. It’s just some pleasant time for ourselves to unwind at the end of the day, before going to bed, just to help make that transition from wakefulness to going to bed more pleasant, more relaxing, more enjoyable, just so it feels good. Jim Evans: Yeah, and it’s a transition from the work day to to the bedtime, because honestly, without that, some people, and I used to have the habit of feeling like I could work up until the point when I went to bed. And now, you’re right, it’s having a little bit of that me time, so you can let those workday thoughts leave the brain, and you can do something relaxing. But I fell into that trap that you described. I was trying to use the sleep buffer as the time where I was just chasing after sleep, and that’s why I was meditating during that time, and I was doing anything possible to try to set myself up for success. I’m a lot more casual about it now. I do find that there’s certain activities that I really cannot do during my sleep buffer, though. One of them is, I can’t do gaming. I’m a PC gamer, a console gamer, and I simply can’t do that because my adrenaline gets brought up. If I’m playing a first person shooter, an RPG, and then if I were to do that and then try to jump in bed, I’m not going to be able to get to sleep. So, that’s one thing I do notice. I think people have to find whatever activities are good for them, whether it’s knitting, reading, whatever it is, but it’s probably going to need to be something relaxing, both mentally and physically, versus something that stimulates the brain or stimulates the body. That’s kind of what I’ve found. Martin Reed: Yeah. That’s a great point, and I think it’s not something we need to get really wrapped up in trials and experiments. A lot of it does just come down to either our own experience or just a little bit of common sense. If we do something that’s really going to release a lot of adrenaline in our body, then maybe that’s not the best thing to be engaged in. But other people, they love it. I have clients that tell me, “I love playing Call of Duty at night before bed. I find it really relaxes me.” And personally, I think that’s crazy, but you know, we’re all different. We all know what makes us feel good, so it really doesn’t matter. There shouldn’t be any rules, regulations around this. It’s just stuff that you find relaxing and enjoyable before going to bed can be really helpful. And similarly, that’s a good little transition into our reaction to wakefulness during the night. When we wake during the night, again, there’s nothing we can do to make ourselves fall back to sleep, and the more we try, the more difficult it’s going to be. So again, you touched upon getting out of bed and doing something else. So again, all we are doing here is, if it doesn’t feel good to be awake at night, let’s just give ourselves the opportunity to make being awake more pleasant. Because we can’t control sleep and wakefulness, but we can control what we do. So if it feels really uncomfortable to be awake in bed, we’re tossing and turning, frustrated, angry, depressed, not feeling good, battling with sleep and wakefulness, let’s just get out of bed and just do something more appealing instead. And if we do feel sleepy again, then we might return to bed and allow ourselves to be in bed for as long as it feels good to be in bed until our alarm goes off in the morning. We might fall back to sleep. We might not. We can’t control that stuff. All we can control are our actions. So, we always have that option, if being awake at night doesn’t feel good we can do something else that might make being awake a little bit more pleasant. Jim Evans: Yep. Yeah, I find if I can’t sleep, I’ll just get up and I’ll just, I don’t turn the TV on, but I’ll just sit in the living room, and I’ll just relax. And sometimes I’ll read, but sometimes just sitting on the couch for a little while and just relaxing, and then after 15, 20 minutes, my body’s like, okay, let’s go back to bed, and then I’ll go back to bed and I’ll successfully fall asleep. Doesn’t happen that often, but maybe once or twice a month at most. But I don’t fight it anymore. Whereas I used to lay in bed and agonize. Used to play the game, looking at the alarm clock and saying, okay, I have four hours now before I have to get up. Okay, I have three hours, I have to get up. Some strategizing. Okay, if I just fall asleep now, I should be able to get enough sleep to be able to be energetic for tomorrow. And those kind of thoughts are very destructive, and they don’t help you get to sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. It’s so tempting to just be staring at that clock during all that wakefulness, right?And it’s always one of the first things when I’m talking to clients is, hey, you want to try something different? How about we don’t check the clock? From the moment you go to bed to when you get up in the morning, let’s just try not checking the clock and just see if you find that helpful. And everyone’s different. We never know how each individual is going to react, but I would say the vast majority of clients find that really helpful. It’s such a small change to make, but it can just be so helpful. It just eliminates such a big source of pressure and worry and anxiety, just not checking that time. Jim Evans: Yeah. I used to do that too. I used to turn the alarm clock around and not look at it. But I find, now I don’t have any anxiety around the time, so I just leave it there. So if I wake up and it’s 3:00, and I’m like, no big deal. But before, it gave me significant anxiety to be constantly checking the alarm clock, and I had to turn it around and not look at it, because it was just a constant source of worry about how much time I’ve been laying in bed and how much time I have left before I have to get up. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well, one thing I did just want to cover, if you feel okay talking about it was, I remember when we first started working together, you were taking, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was some kind of over the counter sleep supplement, and one of your goals was to kind of move away from that. And so, when you felt ready to do so, you were like, all right, I’m going to start by cutting this in half, and that first night you took half that dose. You found it did take longer to fall asleep, and I remember you sharing that with me. Can you tell us a little bit more about that process, how you started to taper off that supplement and move away from it? Jim Evans: Yeah. At one point I was taking 10 milligrams of melatonin, which is way too much. I don’t recommend anybody take that amount of melatonin. But then I was taking, I think when I was seeing you, I was taking six milligrams of melatonin. I cut it down to three, and then I cut it down to zero. But what I found with melatonin is that the substance works for a little while, but then over time, your body just gets used to it and you need more and more of it for it to work and I don’t notice the difference in my sleep quality between when I take melatonin and when I don’t. The problem is, it’s unregulated, and I don’t think we know what the upper limit is, and I don’t think we know what the long term ramifications on people’s health is. My naturopath was okay with it in low doses, but even she said I shouldn’t be taking it for the rest of my life. So, it was a temporary solution at best, and then I found over time, the efficacy of the melatonin was just, it was degrading. And so, yeah, I went from six milligrams down to three milligrams, and then after, I think, a week or two weeks, tapered it down to one or two milligrams. And I know some people that take one or two milligrams at night and they find that successful, but I think it’s more of a mental crutch than anything. I think that’s what it was for me. And once I discovered that it was a mental crutch, that it was just something that I felt like was helping me, I was able to get rid of it then, and my sleep was just fine. Martin Reed: Yeah. We were touching earlier upon this, one of the, I’m going to use that horrible phrase again, the sleep restriction. I prefer sleep window. Let’s say sleep window, with that earliest possible bedtime, really consistent out of bed time in the morning. One of the real benefits is it stops us from chasing sleep. I remember when you started that process of tapering the supplement, you had some initial sleep disruption. If we didn’t have that sleep window, what our temptation is going to be, I’m going to sleep in for longer now to try and catch up on that lost sleep, or I’m going to go to bed earlier the next night. And really what that does is, it just kind of, that sleep disruption can then leak into following nights. But I remember with you, you were just really determined. I’m going to stick to that sleep window, even though I’m having these difficult nights, even though I’m tapering off this sleep supplement. And then, as a result, you kind of kept things, you kept your routine consistent, and so once the brain was doing a little bit less monitoring for the results of that change, that tapering process, you found that things stabilized again, and you got right back on track, and that is completely down to your own efforts to commit to behaviors that just create those good conditions for sleep, create and maintain those good conditions for sleep. One of which is not chasing after sleep, having that really consistent sleep schedule. Jim Evans: Yeah. I had no choice. I feel I had no choice but to really stick strictly to your sleep recommendations, because after more than a decade of insomnia and trying different things, and going to different sleep doctors, I was desperate. I found you on YouTube and you had this pleasant demeanor. You seem to… you obviously know a lot about sleep. But if this wasn’t going to be the cure, I didn’t know where I was going to go next, because sleeping pills didn’t work, melatonin supplements didn’t work, different sleep techniques that I tried didn’t work. And so, yeah, that’s the reason why I stuck to it as much as possible. I think I was more strict with me than you were through the program, Because you were like, “Well, if you need an extra 15 minutes in your sleep window, why don’t you add it?” And I said to you at one point, I’m like, “No, I’ll stay here for a little while. I want to make sure that I’ve gained as much efficiency as possible before I move on to the next 15 minute increment.” And then, after you and I had worked together, then I added 15 minute increments slowly over time, and got my body used to that new window, while keeping the efficiency, because that was important to me. What I didn’t want to do is go, okay, here’s my reduced sleep window, and then, okay, go back to eight or nine hour sleep window. I wouldn’t bring that efficiency along with me with those changes. So, just layering on a little bit more sleep to the beginning of my sleep schedule was kind of the way I got back to what I would consider a normal amount of sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s important to emphasize too that, like with any of these techniques that we are talking about, none of them can generate sleep. None of them make sleep happen. They just help set the stage for sleep, and they just help us avoid falling into that trap of implementing behaviors that just perpetuate sleep disruption, that give insomnia the oxygen it needs to keep going. And so, I just think that’s helpful just to just emphasize. That’s why, when clients say to me, “Oh, I really wish I could just go to bed earlier.” Well, how about you just allow yourself to go to bed a bit earlier? 15 minutes, half an hour, maybe even an hour earlier. If you’re feeling really sleepy you’re really struggling to stay awake, why not just go to bed and see what happens? You know, after all that, if it starts to feel unpleasant being in bed, you’ve always got that opportunity to just get back out of bed again and just do something more enjoyable. And if that sense of sleepiness comes back, then you can just return to bed. We just want to make the process of sleep more natural, and in the short term, this can involve changing our behaviors in a way that might not feel quite so natural, but as we kind of see some results, see that, ah, these are making some changes, these are influencing things in a positive way, then we can start loosening the reins, so to speak, and giving ourselves more opportunity for sleep, being little bit less rigid with ourselves and being a bit more flexible. Something that you touched upon earlier, like right near the start of this conversation, as you said that you found the really stressful days, they started to no longer have such an impact on your sleep as they used to in the past. I’m curious to hear more about that. Why do you think that these stressful days started to have less impact on your sleep, less influence than they did in the past? Jim Evans: Well, I think it was because I finally addressed the underlying cause of the sleep issue, which was creating a good sleep structure and a good sleep window. So my brain, whether I was stressed or not stressed, my body and brain kind of knew that, look, this is the time that you’re supposed to sleep, and now I associate that time with sleep. I do notice that after a stressful day, I don’t sleep as well than I would if I had a less stressful day. But I think the sleep buffer also was the other piece of it that contributed significantly, was having that space between the stress of the day and the time when you’re supposed to sleep. If you think about it, it’s like a demilitarized zone. It’s like this space where we’re going to keep the conflict away from. But so, having that space and that zone where you can just kind of relax, that free time, and then your brain can transition from one mode to the other mode, and then finally, by the time you go to bed, you can just, you get in bed and you can fall asleep with, with greater efficiency. So, I think it was a couple of things that contributed to that. But yeah, so stress nowadays, I mean, I have days that are tremendously stressful, and I can’t think of any of them that created insomnia. Which is kind of surprising to me, even a year later because, because I used to associate stress with the insomnia. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think something, a little hint there at the end was the fact that, because we feel stressed in a similar way, just because we feel anxious, just because we feel worried, that doesn’t mean that sleep can’t happen because we feel stressed, because we feel worried, because we feel anxious. Often, it’s our battle with that that makes sleep more difficult, because it doesn’t feel good to feel stressed. It doesn’t feel good to feel worried. It doesn’t feel good to feel anxious. So we try and push that away. We try and fight it, we try and avoid it. And then, when we get involved in that battle, I think that’s what truly makes sleep more difficult. It’s not necessarily the presence of these thoughts and feelings, it’s our reaction to them, and because they don’t feel good, we want to push them away. Then they push back harder. Then we try and push back harder. That’s what makes sleep more difficult. So I think, when we get to that point where we still have stress, we still have worry, we still have anxiety, because we’re human beings, we all experience those feelings, those emotions. If we can just get to a point where we just kind of acknowledge that I’m feeling stressed, I’m feeling anxious, and maybe even just make a little bit of space for that to hang out, and then just redirect our attention onto where we are, what we’re doing. And that’s where I think that wind down routine can be helpful, just giving ourselves some time to sit, let that stress just hang out on our shoulder whilst we read a book or watch TV or just do something pleasant, relaxing and enjoyable. Because it’s not that presence sitting on our shoulder that stops sleep. It’s us trying to keep brushing it off our shoulder, then it pops back, and then we try and brush it off again. I think that’s what truly makes sleep more difficult. Jim Evans: Yeah. It’s kind of the same concept with meditation. When you have the bad thoughts coming in, you’re not supposed to fight them off. You’re supposed to kind of just let them flow through you. I know I notice with stress, it will affect your sleep. It will affect the quality, and in terms of some of the dreams that you have, but it doesn’t necessarily need to take over your entire sleeping life. And that always surprised me, because I just always thought that there was just a strong correlation between stressful days and not sleeping. So, I’m glad I’m past that, because now I’ll have horribly stressful days. I’ll have some days where I’m working until 9:00 or 10:00 at night when I have a board meeting, and then I’ll go home and be wound up and still need an hour before I can hit the bed, and it could be midnight, but then have a really good night’s sleep and wake up the next day feeling refreshed. It’s a good feeling. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, here we are now. It’s been over a year since we stopped working together. What’s an average night like for you now, Jim? Is there an average night? I’d just love to hear your experience with what sleep is typically like for you nowadays. Jim Evans: So, I’m pretty pleased to tell you that after more than a year, I’m averaging seven hours of sleep a night. I wake up about three times each night, and that’s not because of insomnia it’s because I have an overactive bladder. So I’ll wake up, I’ll go hit the restroom, but then I come back to bed and I’ll fall back asleep within two or three minutes. And so, that’s an average night for me. Last night, I did really well. I don’t know why, but I went to bed maybe 10 minutes earlier than I normally would, but I got like seven and a half hours of sleep last night, which is unbelievable. And so, yeah, it’s been good. And I may experience insomnia maybe, at most, once a month. And this is coming from a guy that, when I came to you, again, I hadn’t slept well in probably a decade. And, and that decade was probably closer to maybe two decades. I don’t even know, but it was, it was a lot more than 10 years. And I just, I could count the number of times I slept well in a month on a single hand before, and now, and now it’s very unusual for me to have a poor night’s sleep now. Martin Reed: Wow. And how about the days? Do they tend to feel any different? Because I always like to think that people without insomnia, they always just think that insomnia is a nighttime problem, but I think that it can be a real daytime challenge as well, because all those, that fatigue, the thoughts, the feelings, all the stuff that comes along for the ride can really affect our days too. Are you finding any changing in your days now that your nights are a bit different? Jim Evans: Yeah. I have energy to make it through the entire day now, where I don’t start feeling tired until maybe an hour or two hours. Maybe an hour, half hour before sleep. So before, I used to get tired in the afternoon around 2:00, and I would feel like the rest of the day, I was extraordinarily tired. I’d like I had fatigue. I wouldn’t recover from physical activity. My mental acuity was way off, so I wouldn’t be able to focus on any one thing. So, so those are some of the things that I experienced before. But now, I feel sharp. I feel like I have enough energy to make it through the day, and I have focus. So, yeah, it’s been great. I feel for people that have insomnia. I occasionally go on your forum and see what the people are dealing with, and I’m very thankful that I’ve gone through your program and that I’m not at that space anymore. And hopefully this video will help your viewers, and more people will reach out to you and go through the program. I think for me, you have different programs that you offer, but for me, the eight-week program, really being able to rediscipline my sleep and learn all the techniques that you taught, I don’t think I could have solved it without going through that program. Martin Reed: Yeah. That’s great. I’m really grateful that you’ve come on and just shared your experience in your own words, just because I think it’s so helpful for people to listen to a transformation like yours. Because I think if anyone listening to this or watching this can identify with the kind of things that you are talking about, your experience with the sleep disruption, then they might recognize that their insomnia isn’t unique. That if you were able to put it behind you and get to a different place, then they can too. And it’s just so powerful to hear this from guests, from people that have been through it, so I’m really grateful that you’ve taken the time out for your day to come on and share this in your own words. But having said that, I’ve got one last question for you, Jim, and it’s a question that I ask everyone, so I don’t want to leave you out, and it’s this: If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and feels as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Jim Evans: I guess the biggest thing, the key is, you said if they have insomnia for a long period of time, I think you really have to find a program like yours that can help retrain them on how to sleep, and build the sleep efficiency, create the sleep structure that’s needed. I think that was the only way, because again, I went to three different sleep doctors, had a sleep study, was on different types of over the counter sleep medicine, sleeping pills. Absolutely none of that stuff worked, for a decade. It wasn’t until I discovered your approach and met you that I was able to resolve this. So, my recommendation is try to deal with the underlying root cause, which is usually, which is poor sleep habits, and try to fix the sleep structure. And I think your program does that very well. Martin Reed: Great. Well, I really appreciate that, Jim, and I appreciate, again, you taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast. Thank you so much. Jim Evans: Well, I appreciate you having me on, thank you. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Nick’s insomnia journey began in 2000 when he relocated and started a new job. Stress, uncertainty, and anxiety took over his life as he found that the more he tried to fight or avoid his thoughts the more powerful they became. Nick felt helpless. He didn’t know how to deal with the difficult thoughts and feelings he was experiencing and he didn’t know how to improve his sleep. The more he tried, the more he struggled. In this episode, Nick shares how he adopted a new approach to dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings. Instead of trying to control them, he began to acknowledge them and make space for them. Instead of fighting with them and getting distracted by them, he validated them and then redirected his attention on actions that would help him move toward the life he wanted to live. Nick practiced kindly bringing his mind back to the present whenever it started to time travel. He began to notice and savor all the things he was missing out on when he found himself running on autopilot. He started to focus on living a life aligned with his values — doing things that were important to him — even after difficult nights and even in the presence of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. Today, Nick has a different and more workable relationship with sleep and the full range of thoughts and feelings he experiences as a human being. He is no longer haunted by sleep. He sees sleep as part of his life but not his entire life. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Nick. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today. Nick Hobbs: Hi, Martin. It’s really lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Martin Reed: Absolutely. I can’t wait to get onto our discussion, so let’s just get started right away. When did your sleep problems first begin, and what do you think caused those initial issues with sleep? Nick Hobbs: It’s lovely when you got hindsight, isn’t it? I can look back and around about the year 2000, I moved states, and started to live in a new city, and a new situation. And at the time, I would’ve told you that I was anxious about starting a new job. And, but looking back, I can see that it wasn’t partly situational crisis of just uncertainty, unknowing. But actually when I look back, that was a big life change as well. That was a big shift in direction. And I guess how I would answer that question now would be that well, partly it’s to do with in daily stress reaching a certain level, where on which I wasn’t really dealing with. But the other side of that was a sense of not being sure whether I was heading in the right direction with the decision that I’d made about moving to another place. Nick Hobbs: So that’s a slightly bigger picture concern or uncertainty. And I think the other thing was that having done the course with you, looking back, it’s a really interesting question, because it shows me that I actually didn’t know a lot about what to do when my sleep was being disturbed by the things that happened to us in our life. Does that make sense? Martin Reed: Yeah. Nick Hobbs: So I can see now that I didn’t have a great ability to respond to the needs that I had at the time. Martin Reed: So talking about that response, because I think most of us can recognize, there are always going to be some times in our life when we have some difficult nights, especially if there’s a big life change going on, or if something unusual or stressful happens in our lives. And normally sleep will just get right back on track as soon as we’ve adapted, or as soon as that event is behind us. But often, as you’ve experienced yourself, those sleep problems can stick around. So looking back, what was it you think that kept those sleep issues around? Why didn’t they just sort themselves out after that life change that you just described had occurred? Nick Hobbs: Partly, I think they resolved in about 2007. So I’d say there was a bit of a seven year period there where the sleep was a really unknown prospect for me, where I just lost confidence. So it’s partly about losing confidence in my ability to do something, which had never really been a preoccupation of mine up until that time. And so the changes kept coming throughout that period. I relocated again several times in that period, so that constant trying to define… And this is a period of young adulthood. And so that in itself was maybe partly about a life cycle issue that it just took time to find my way, and my place in the world. But I think more than anything, because a lot of people have to find their way in the world. Nick Hobbs: Not everyone is having sleep issues. So to me, then I look back and I go, “Well, actually, lack of confidence was a huge one.” And just lack of insight about what it is that keeps things going. So I just developed really, probably quite, unhelpful ways of responding to the way my brain. We talk about in your course, you talk about operant conditioning, and you talk about the way that our brain is wired to foresee threats and dangers, and to highlight those, and bring those to your attention. So I really didn’t have a very good way of responding to that. I felt really trapped by those thoughts. When they appeared, they just took over. That was the agenda, and I didn’t have, really, any ways to unhook from that. Nick Hobbs: And then I thought I could control my thoughts and my feelings. I thought that was the way to go. Try and distract myself from the things that were going on inside of me. And so therefore, inevitably, of course, nothing seemed to get resolved. It seems pretty straightforward now, doesn’t it? When you say it like that, but at the time, I just remember being so confused by the whole process. And therefore, it just kept rolling and taking on its own life. And then anxiety becomes then anxiety about anxiety, and it’s the hall of mirrors, isn’t it? You get this bigger response. Oh my God, I got these feelings of anxiety. Nick Hobbs: I start to associate bedtime with this sense of uncertainty and lack of confidence. And then from there, it builds to a thought process that kicks in where you start to just become hyper alert, but not necessarily attentive to the thought processes that are keeping that going. You’re not able to going to necessarily notice what’s happening, just in it. It’s very confusing space to be. It’s a bit of a labyrinth, isn’t it? It’s probably a good word for it, really. Martin Reed: Yeah. I completely agree with you. But when you were trapped in that struggle, what were those nights like? Was there a typical night or would you have trouble just first falling asleep? Or was it staying asleep? Or it’s just every night different… But it’s always a struggle? Nick Hobbs: Yeah. Look, it was a war of attrition. I think you can keep going and going, and it’s amazing how far you can go without sleep really, how far you can push yourself. But of course, then you collapse into this sleep. It takes over eventually. But it’s a good word for it, struggle, because it was. It really felt like those nights just ended up being a struggle. First, it would start off with a benign acceptance that, maybe it’ll come, maybe it won’t. And then you hear a partner sleeping or you start to get envious. You kick off, your mind starts running along these paths. Well, why is it not me? And what is it about me? Nick Hobbs: You get a bit preoccupied, very much preoccupied and self-centric. I think that those interior thought processes, it would be very much about not getting to sleep, and then ramping up, and then not sleeping, and then becoming, “Oh, well, the time. The one thing I don’t want to hear is the birds before the sun rises. The one thing I don’t want to see is the sun.” And of course, that’s exactly what would happen. The birds would come and they would become, instead of sweet sounding harbingers of a beautiful new day, they became this awesome specter of the drudgery that I’d have to force myself through the next day. So I just became very cued to those things, and quite demoralized and dispirited. Nick Hobbs: So by dawn, I was exhausted. I had mentally fought my way and tried to control myself. I’d be angry, full of self pity, definitely confused. And a source of distress for people around me too. You could see me in obvious distress, and they really couldn’t do anything to help me. And I didn’t really know how to help myself either, really. I just felt very helpless in that. So those nights, and they would come, there would be a run of them. And then maybe it would settle down, and there would usually be some anticipatory trigger. If it wasn’t, “I’m not going to go to sleep,” it might be, “Oh, gee, I’ve got to get up early in the morning.” That’s a classic one, isn’t it? Nick Hobbs: I’ve got to get up early in the morning. Oh, I hope I get to sleep because I really wouldn’t like to not get to sleep, and on it goes. This kind of self-talk and self worry and, “Oh, shit. It didn’t happen before and maybe it’s going to happen again. Oh.” So yeah, that’s a typical pattern for me at the time. Right through, and then it would settle, and then maybe something, another change would come in life. And at 2007, another shift, and 2010 there were periods where it would lull for a little while. And then it’s like, “Oh my God, it’s come back. Oh, I thought I’d left these things behind, and here they are again coming to haunt me.” And it would get even worse then because like, “Oh my God. I’m never going to be free of this.” Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s interesting as well how, like I touched upon earlier, it tends to start with this trigger. So there’s this trigger of a life change. We’re relocating for example. And that becomes, all our concern around that, it manifests. The symptom becomes difficult nights of sleep. But then sometimes it can morph into then your concern isn’t about whatever that trigger was. So for example, you’re not really concerned about the relocation anymore, because either you’ve just adapted to it’s happening or it’s already happened. Martin Reed: Then the concern becomes, am I going to sleep tonight? Is this sleep problem going to go away? How long is it going to take me to fall asleep? Why am I not falling asleep yet? What’s going to happen if I don’t get any sleep? So it shifts. The concern was once on that trigger for insomnia but when that triggers disappeared, the concern is still there. But the concern now moves on solely to sleep. And I think that’s where we get caught up in that struggle. Nick Hobbs: No, I agree with you. I think it really takes on a life of its own, which is even scarier really, when you realize that. You go, “Oh my God.” You think it’s related to, if I just fix things in my life. And then you’re, “Well, but why is it still here?” Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. Nick Hobbs: Our brains are really adaptable, aren’t they? They’re really absorbing and they take account of so many things. So yeah. I agree. I think you’ve described that very well, definitely. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well, what’s our brain’s number one job is to look out for us, so it’s always going to be monitoring for threats. And as soon as it detects a slight hint of a threat, it’s going to amplify it and amplify it and amplify it. And because, often, when the brain identifies a threat, we don’t feel good. Whether it’s that fight or flight response, some anxiety or stress, because it doesn’t feel good. Normally, we want to avoid it or push it away or suppress it. And then the brain’s like, “There’s this threat and now you’re ignoring me.” So what does the brain do? It’s got to yell louder and louder and louder. And that’s when we get really tangled up in that struggle, and through no fault of our own because it’s just our normal human response. Martin Reed: We don’t want to feel that way, but the brain thinks it’s being ignored. So it just yells harder and harder, and so then we try harder and harder to push it away as like a tug of war. The more we are trying, the more difficult it becomes. And the more fatigued we feel, all those symptoms that we associate with insomnia is often down to that struggle, that battle with sleep itself, wakefulness and how we’re feeling. Nick Hobbs: I think you captured that really well. Martin Reed: Oh, thank you. I think people that have never struggled with insomnia really also don’t recognize that it’s not just a nighttime issue. It’s something we carry during the day as well, whether it’s through how we feel, or through all the stuff that’s going through our head, or even how that influences the things we do. Our actions and our behaviors. How are you finding the sleep? Whether it was because you had difficult nights or just all that mental chatter about what if. How are you finding that was affecting your days? Nick Hobbs: It was having a very significant effect on my days because you know that you could be having a very different day if you’d slept. So this comparison point between the Nick that sleeps and the Nick that doesn’t sleep is just so present in every part of that day. And you just learn to find resources. So on the one side of it, you’ve got the handbrake on and you just can’t seem to figure out how to get the handbrake off. But you know you’ve got to push through. So some days, I would actually not turn up to work. I would just stay at home and just feel quite useless, and do very little, and just wait helplessly for the night to come, right? Nick Hobbs: And realizing that I’d really never got any solution. Other times, I’d just push through, go to work, get through the day, feel exhausted, feel numb. Your body just becomes so over driven and over aroused, and that your body system, you know that they’re in high alert. Your stomach’s not functioning well and your brain is just feeling so tired, and it’s just been going on and on and around and around and around. And you just have a sense that this is not the life that I know that I can live, but I don’t quite know how to get to the promised land. I don’t know really how to get out of this labyrinth that you’d described before. And the way my mind is just seems to be telling me about all these alarms and alerts. Nick Hobbs: And it seems to be going off and off and off. But I know logically, I know that I really didn’t need to not sleep that night. The things that I was worried about happening the next day, sometimes they didn’t even occur. Sometimes they happened, but they weren’t bad. So I know that I was talking myself into an unnecessary state of arousal. I know I was elevated in the night, and I would look back and go, “Why do I do that? What is the reason? What is the purpose? How can I be really that keyed up that I don’t sleep?” So I would come out of it with a self… there would be this self-criticism in the back of my mind during the day. Nick Hobbs: Why, Nick? What is wrong with you? Maybe there’s something wrong with you. Gee, Martin, why do we have a brain, really? I know you’ve explained it, but gee, it does play havoc in a world where you really feel like you’ve got to fit into a 9:00 to 5:00 structure. I love routines and I love structures now. And I don’t struggle with them half for so much as I did then. And it does make it very hard to fit into a routine life. But ironically, that’s a bit of a savior too. You just get up. Those days, you haven’t slept then well, I’m just going to follow the pattern. I’m just going to go and do what I have to do. Nick Hobbs: I may not be a hundred percent around it, but might be pretty average. But often, that’s probably an internal perception. Externally, people may not know. And that’s the other thing I didn’t know what to do about in the day when I was really deep in the sleep problems, is what to do about talking about it. I didn’t talk about it much. Maybe an admission of weakness or dysfunction, or maybe projected an image of myself that I didn’t like. So there was a sense of shame around it. So I didn’t talk about it openly, but when I did, you would find that lots of people get affected by sleep. And lots of people have sleep that is probably less than ideal to them. And I think a lot of those conversations weren’t very helpful to me either because they didn’t really know what the answers were either, right? Nick Hobbs: So talking about it wasn’t particularly helpful, and there were lots of well-meaning people that would give me lots of suggestions that didn’t seem to work. And in the end, I actually just didn’t talk about it really with anyone. And then it becomes very private and very internal, and in a way, it’s strangely isolating, and a bit of a lonely space. Yeah. And that’s why it’s been really nice about coming across this whole phenomenon of sleep coaching. And I don’t know if that’s more recent, but boy, it would’ve been very useful to get that much earlier on in my life for sure. It’s a very constructive way of talking about sleep, I think. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think also, you touched upon a really good point about how very few of us talk about our struggles. So just to use, for example, social networking as an example, everything we see on social media like on Facebook, on Instagram, everyone’s always really happy. They’re on vacation, they’re happy families, they’re doing things that look really exciting and enjoyable. We never see any of the struggle. It’s always filtered out. So whenever we are struggling, which is a normal part of being a human being, we feel there’s something wrong. Martin Reed: Whereas what would probably be more wrong would just be living a life where we’re happy and fulfilled 100% of the time, and never ever feeling any pain, or any struggle, or any anxiety, or stress, or worry. That’s all filtered away from us. So it can really turn ourselves inwards thinking there is something wrong. Why aren’t we feeling this way? Why aren’t we feeling as good as everyone else? Why are we struggling? And the truth is, everyone out there is struggling. It’s just we’re all hiding it from one another. Nick Hobbs: Yeah, we do. We have these things very privately but as well, in addition to that, I think you’re right. Addition to that is we don’t necessarily know how to respond to people’s problems either. And when I would open up, the most common response would be a problem solving response. And what I valued about coming in contact with your program and the way you run that program is what’s really evident in the way you talk about people’s experiences that you validate them. You validate what’s going on for them. Nick Hobbs: You don’t try and focus on the outcome and the guarantee, do this and you’ll have that. And it’s not a problem solving approach so much as it’s one about understanding. And it’s one about validating and understanding what’s actually happening for people. And then working from that spot, which takes a lot of that pressure off, because it’s the pressure that we build internally, in our minds, and the expectations that you’re right. We have these expectations about how we should look, behave, feel, be, and experience life that come to us from so many different places. Nick Hobbs: And we want that. They’re very inspiring images, and I think my expectations around wanting to be the perfect sleeper were very much a part of that too. I don’t think I was any different, but I did really respond to the validation that comes through the way you communicate with your audience. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. And the reason why that’s important to me is because all these things we’re feeling, all these struggles that we’re struggling with, all the challenges we face, they’re real. And so why would we try to deny that? Why encourage getting wrapped up in trying to fight that? It makes sense that we would want to fight it, but it would be a losing battle because we just can’t control what’s going on inside of us. And all of our thoughts and our feelings, we can’t control that. We can temporarily maybe feel better, temporarily. Some people might take a couple of drinks, temporarily feel better, for example. But over the long term, we just can’t control how we feel. It’s just one extra struggle that we are just going to be involving ourselves in, and we’re all human beings. Martin Reed: So we’re all going to feel an experience, the full range of human emotions throughout our life. Some of them are going to make us feel good. Some are not going to make us feel good. Sometimes, just acknowledging what we’re feeling can just be so helpful. Not trying to push it away, not trying to deny it, just acknowledging what we’re feeling is real because it is. But then maybe, just exploring our relationship with those thoughts and those feelings. So instead of just by default, which is human nature, trying to push them away when they don’t feel good, maybe just making a little bit of space for them. Martin Reed: Allowing them to come and go as they please. And even whilst they’re there, doing things that are important to us, and that truly are going to have a very real influence on the life we live. If we do things that are important to us, even when all that stuff is sitting inside of our brain. Because we always have control over our actions, but we never really have control over what’s going on inside our brains in terms of what it’s thinking, what it’s feeling. Nick Hobbs: Well said. I think that probably is the heart CBT-I. Martin Reed: I think the traditional cognitive side of the CBT model is all about how accurate are these thoughts that I’m having? Maybe there’s a more accurate way of thinking and maybe trying to change those thoughts from one type of thought that might not be very accurate, or helpful to a thought that is more accurate, and maybe more helpful. But I’m increasingly believing that we don’t even need to get tangled up there. We just need to acknowledge what those thoughts and feelings are that we’re having. Allow them to exist. Martin Reed: We don’t have to evaluate them. We don’t have to get caught up in them. We just need to acknowledge them, that they’re there. If we do have to take action, oh, the kitchen’s on fire. Well, yeah, we don’t just want that to sit in the back of our mind and let the kitchen burn down. There’s some stuff that we do have to take action on, but if it’s other things like, “I’m going to be exhausted tomorrow. I’m not going to be able to meet up with my friends tonight.” Maybe we just make some space for those thoughts to exist and then go about our actions anyway, regardless choosing to do things that are important to us, even in the presence of all that really difficult stuff going on inside our minds. Nick Hobbs: Yeah. I when you say that, I can definitely look back and I can go, “Wow, I wasn’t doing any of that.” I was just really focused on trying to push the feeling of anxiety away from myself. Trying to suppress it very effectively, but try and somehow distract myself from the thinking that was going along. So I would, at times, especially when I was doing your program, wake up in the night and I wasn’t even sure whether I’d been asleep or not. And so then I, “Oh, I probably didn’t even fall asleep. Oh, gee.” Really, it starts all kicking in again, right? Nick Hobbs: It’s programming. All this old programming is just ready and waiting to go, and now I can see that you’re right. If I make space for things. If I just allow and have a bit more of a self validating response, then I just acknowledge that, yep. I notice there’s that thought again, or there’s that narrative, or there’s that story, or there’s those feelings. There are those sensations. If I were to probably just make some space for them, that would’ve been heading in a better direction, in a more fruitful direction than panicking about them. Because I think that’s one of the things that I learned coming out of this program was that, you say about focus on behavior because that’s what you can control. Nick Hobbs: And when you’re in that labyrinth of that sleep confusion and that sleeplessness, and when it’s really seems to be dragging you along, a lot of what motivates your behavior is fear, anxiety, and you’re right. We’re focused on the outcome, not so much the process. The way that we get from A to B. It just becomes all about, well, what if I don’t get to B? And so there’s a real imbalance there, and what I find you have on the one side, those fears and anxieties, that motivate behavior. But on the other side, I guess what this program that you deliver, what I participated in, really got me to understand that there is another motivation for behavior, and that’s values. That’s the things that we stand for. Nick Hobbs: Those are the things that are important to us. And at the end of the day, yet we do have the option of sitting there and giving up. But if we’re not going to just sit there and give up, and we can’t just sit there, and give up forever. We’re going to have to stand for something. Looking back, anyone who goes and seeks out information to try, and resolve their situation, make improve their sleep better. Anyone who decides to sign up to a course and a program, and see it through is really standing for something. Really, aren’t they? They’re making a statement around their values and what’s important to them. That their health and that their wellbeing is important to them, or that the impact of what this is doing to other people is important to them, or the sense of what they want to have in their lives is important to them. Nick Hobbs: And so in the Sleep Diary so to speak, you really talk about what have you done in the day? What is it that you valued about doing in the day? What did you enjoy about the day? Rate your day, the quality of your day, and what gave it that quality? That is about connecting with what’s important to you, and that’s a different motivation for behavior. That is qualitatively very different from the fight flight stuff that you seem to be talking about with the brain, the way the brain’s looking more skewed for danger, and keeping us safe, and alerting us, and remembering things that maybe you felt unpleasant, or uncomfortable that we don’t want to have to go through again, which is really important. But it seems to just take over. It just seems to have the line share of head space. And then quietly, right in the corner, this little values voice that’s being drowned out all the time by these sirens, and fire, and running in, and the whole bit. Nick Hobbs: And that was a significant moment of awareness for me and a relief, to be honest with you, because it’s pretty stressful having a brain that’s just always geared, and chattering, and anxious. Like the overbearing anxious friend who really wants the best for you, but boy, how annoying. I was like, “You just want a bit of a break.” So the Sleep Diary was fascinating because I thought the Sleep Diary was going to be a trigger for me, and make things worse for my sleep. And it did. It did. My brain initially… I just focused on the steps and the numbers, and whether or not, and was it going to be another crap reporting day of no sleep? And it was. I felt like the training wheels came off and boom. Bike crashed, and I crashed. Nick Hobbs: First couple of weeks was worse on the program than before. Oh my God, catastrophizing again. But surely, doing the Sleep Diary when I actually started to understand about focusing on what I can control in my behavior, and focusing on behavior that is directed towards doing things in the day that mean something, that are important, making space for that, making time for that. I didn’t see the link initially. I thought, “Well, what’s the connection?” I’m trying to sleep here, Martin. I’m trying to sleep and you are getting me to focus on what I’ve done in the day that I enjoyed. Great. Yeah. That’s excellent. All right. Nick Hobbs: But really, when I see it, it’s creating space in my mind for it. It’s about shifting the balance, isn’t it? It seems to me, anyway, about really balancing the scales again, and getting back in touch with that sense of personal direction. About what’s important and about, well… Sleep will just look after itself. I just focus on doing something with my life so not sitting there, and doing nothing, because that wasn’t helping. Understandable. You can feel absolutely lost in it, and it’s really understandable to just give up for periods of time. But it’s just not a sustainable long term option. Nick Hobbs: So that was very, very helpful making that little connection that you’re talking about. Focus on your behaviors, make space for the feelings, and thoughts as they come, and go. Allow them to. Don’t try and control them but focus on something that’s that’s worth your time, worth your effort. And so I found the Sleep Diary structure really helpful for that. I’m not sure if that’s what the intention was with that Sleep Diary. Maybe it was also to help you get a sense of what was going on for me, but that was certainly one very beneficial strategy. Martin Reed: I love how you talk about values just because, really, they’re the key to the life we live. That we can still move towards our values even when we are really caught up in a lot of struggle. And the interesting thing or the important thing I think to emphasize with values is we never accomplish them. They’re just a journey that we always move towards. And on that journey, there are going to be ups and downs. Sometimes, we’ll move towards that value. Martin Reed: Sometimes, we might move away from that value. Sometimes, we might focus on a different value. We never accomplish our values. We can only ever just keep moving toward them. Sometimes it requires a lot of effort but as long as we do keep moving towards those values, we’re always going to be moving toward the life we want to live. And I think that’s really all that we can do as human beings. That’s the only thing we can control is our actions that move us toward. We can never get to that destination. We can only move toward it. Nick Hobbs: And listening to you say that reminds me that we don’t always spend a lot of time in our daily lives consciously reflecting on our values. And we, well, at times, especially, probably, I would say, times when my sleeps not so great, it would be more characterized by being really focused on tasks, or being overwhelmed by demand, or the struggles and the problems that go on in life, and even seeking pleasure, and enjoying things. And what you say makes complete sense, but not necessarily something that I would’ve carried around consciously prior. And I think that’s something that the Sleep Diary is helpful for because it’s a concrete thing. It’s there in front of you. It’s kind of evidence in a way, and that this is what’s actually happening for you, which is different for what your mind might be constantly telling you about your sleep. Amplifies it, and it really does tend to… Nick Hobbs: When I don’t sleep well, I tend to exaggerate a lot, and everything becomes really much more over the top. And I speak in much more categorical terms about how bad everything is, and it overshadows things. And so when you’ve got this structure there, when you’ve got this Sleep Diary there, it’s really just there quietly sitting there pointing things out to you. So there are potentials there for reflecting around values, because you’ve asked me to rate the quality of my day, and you’ve asked me to note down the things that I did that were important to me, or that felt good, or that were memorable in a positive way. That’s a point of reflection. Martin Reed: Yeah, and I think it also can… I like how you touched upon… This just shows you what the situation is and it might be difficult. You might have had some difficult nights and you’ve maybe written that down on your Sleep Diary. We’re not trying to get away from that. You’ve had some difficult nights. What we’re really trying to do is recognize that’s happening. Not trying to sugarcoat it. If you had a difficult night, you had a difficult night, but is it still possible to do things during the day that don’t have to be huge monumental things? But is it possible to just do some things that are aligned with your values that do help you live the life you want to live independently of how you slept, and independently of all the stuff that might be going on in your brain after those difficult nights too? Nick Hobbs: And that’s the thing, isn’t it? I guess there’s an encouragement implicit in the program that it is possible to do that. It is possible to actually not have slept, but still do things that you enjoy, or still at least savor one, or two of those moments in the day. Even if it is just when you’re doing your Sleep Diary and you’re going, “Oh yeah, well, I did that, and that was… Actually, didn’t mind riding my bike into work. That was the sun.” So there is a sense that you can savor something implicit in a way. Martin Reed: I love that word savor because so much of our lives, whether we’ve got insomnia or not. So much of our lives are on autopilot and we just miss so much of everything that’s going on around us. If we just can slow some of these things down a little bit and just, if we can notice when we are on autopilot, and just bring ourselves back a little bit more to the present moment, it’s amazing all the stuff we miss out on. And it sounds really minor, but even just something like making a cup of tea, or washing the dishes. It’s like, “Oh, I got to wash these dishes now,” and you’re just lathering up the sponge, scraping off all the plates, and stuff. And if you just bring yourself back, you’re thinking of all the other things you got to do, but if you just bring yourself to the present, it’s actually pretty cool. Martin Reed: We turn on a tap, this hot water comes out on demand. We’ve got all these different sensations coming off of our skin. There’s all these different light patterns reflecting off the plate. There’s all these bubbles just floating all over the place. And it’s not life changing to wash the dishes. I’m not trying to say it is, but we miss out on so much when we are just not present on all the stuff we’re doing during the day. Our mind just wanders. We just do things on autopilot. We miss out on so much. So sometimes, just telling ourselves, “I’m going to savor more.” Do some more savoring during the day. It can really just open us up to more of the good stuff that’s around us. More of the stuff that we can be appreciative of too. I think. Nick Hobbs: Yeah, absolutely. All those things are there. One of the memorable feelings you asked me about, how is it? When your day and you haven’t slept. And it definitely comes to mind that the difference is, it is just hard to feel sometimes. You just don’t feel. You’re doing the dishes and it’s a savior in a way to have those little moments, and to focus on that. I think that, so often, when we are having troubles sleeping, when I’ve had trouble sleeping, there is a sense I want to fix it, that I want to solve it, that I can do something, and take a pill, or drink alcohol, or go Shiatsu acupuncture, put a hot water bottle on my head, hide up in a little hole. So many things I try and do to fix sleep as a problem. Nick Hobbs: Whereas your example, I guess it connects to something that I’ve learned, which was that, actually, it’s reframing. It’s not so much a fix as it’s a noticing. It’s as much about just becoming aware of other things other than your preoccupations. It’s about being connected to the present as opposed to being always preoccupied with the past, or the future, which is where the sleep problems sit. They’re always in the past or they’re always in the future, and we are living it out in the present, but our minds are somewhere other than here. And we are not taking in what you were just talking about around that example of a household task. Nick Hobbs: So the power of the program is partly about trying to get us to reframe, and the very counterintuitive response that we have to actually, where we want to fix a problem, to actually not be so focused on fixing a problem, but become aware of noticing things. Noticing what’s going on with your mind and learning about you teach about sleep, and the cycles of sleep, and you teach about what we know about sleep, and you also teach us structure, and strategies, and teach us to focus on being aware, noticing. And that is, again, like values, it’s a different way of responding, isn’t it? It feels more relaxing. It feels much more relaxing to be noticing and paying attention. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s definitely more relaxing than being engaged in that battle. Donning the suit of armor and just trying to fight everything that’s going on inside of us. Nick Hobbs: It takes away your confidence and it’s just so debilitating on so many levels when you’re trying to battle with the way your mind, the way my mind behaves. So hearing your validations when you go through each week and you give a introduction to each week, and really validate the struggle, but at the same time, invite us to do something different about it. Nick Hobbs: That’s that is really helpful actually, because it does just, “Ugh, trying to relax.” It’s ironic, isn’t it? That you’d need to relax to get out of the situation, when you feel like you really need to fix it and battle with it. But ultimately, it doesn’t help. It’s never helped me really, not when it comes to my emotional life anyway. You’re very right. Values don’t ever arrive. There’s really nothing there to fix, is there? It’s just more about taking steps. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. So we’ve talked a lot about exploring our relationship with all the stuff that goes on inside our minds, when we’re struggling with stuff. You’ve touched upon the actions we can take during the day that just help us live a life that’s aligned with our values, or just keep us on that toward side of the road, rather than the away side of the road. So we move toward the life we want to live, even when we’re struggling. One thing we haven’t really touched upon was the things we can do at night. Any changes we can make there that can’t make sleep happen because we just can’t control sleep, but that can just help prevent us from training our brain that wakefulness is this big physical threat that we have to be protected from. Martin Reed: Because then the brain has to be alert to try and protect us from. So typically we’ll do things like spend less time in bed at night. If we’re spending a lot of time awake at night, so we give ourselves an earliest possible bedtime. Final out of bedtime in the morning. And it also helps prevent us from that temptation of trying to chase sleep. So if we have a difficult night, we won’t then go to bed a lot earlier the next night, or stay in bed a lot later the next morning, and perpetuate this ongoing sleep disruption, and doing things like just doing something more enjoyable, if being awake at night doesn’t feel good. Martin Reed: Why endure that? Let’s just do something else that makes wakefulness more pleasant. And I think trying to recall when we were working together, those were the two main changes that you were implementing when we were working together. That sleep window routine there and doing something more enjoyable when wakefulness didn’t feel good. Looking back on that, can you tell us a little bit about what it was like to make those changes? Any struggles or difficulties you had, and how you feel they might have been helpful now that you can look back in, and reflect back on this? Nick Hobbs: Well, the sleep window it was very helpful because it really focused me on trying to stay awake as opposed to trying to get to sleep. Hard to explain that reframing, that shifting, but I found that structure… It was a structure and all I had to do was just live by it. I didn’t have to think it. Nick Hobbs: I didn’t have to calculate anything. Oh, it’s just an action. I just had to stay awake. So that was helpful. It was really, really helpful, and slowly that widened. And then the nighttime, the time that I went to bed became more flexible just around not looking at the clock, but just gauging my sleep levels. Maybe I felt sleepy, tired, only going to bed if I felt sleepy. It just took a lot of pressure away. Nick Hobbs: The thing that really builds up before bed is pressure, expectations, weight of pressure. About performance. Your performance anxiety, isn’t it? Really in a way. So the sleep window was a really, really valuable thing. And of course, the thing that I chose to do in that period before bed was to read a book which made me feel even sleepier, and to do it on the couch. And then I found myself no, I’ve got to sit up and read. No, no, no. I think I’ll just lie down. I think I’ll just lie down and read. And of course, inevitably, I fall asleep and my brain was finding all these ways to trick me, to get me to lay down, all of a sudden, it became, no, I’m going to find ways to make you sleep. Nick Hobbs: And it became another struggle for me in a way. The same struggle mentality was there. And initially, really worried. Oh my God, but I fell asleep at 9:30, but I was got to stay up midnight. So then it would arc up. My thoughts would up again, but over time. And that’s the thing, it’s about patience in a way, isn’t it? Just allowing the program. Just work along the program. So I found not looking at the clock, watching TV, or doing things that were enjoyable in the night, and just going, “Okay. That’s okay. I can do that, and I can be okay with that, and I can try, and encourage myself to enjoy it, and not be too worried about the fact that I’m up, and it’s midnight, or it’s 2:00 in the morning, and I’m watching something on TV that I just wouldn’t be normally…” Doesn’t matter. Just enjoy it. Just try and go along with it and just see where it goes. Nick Hobbs: Take the pressure. So that was very, very helpful those two things definitely. Yeah, and they maybe see that I do try and fall asleep. I was really actively trying to force sleep to happen, and earplugs in. Try and block out all the noise because I can’t sleep if there’s going to be noise. But I can’t control the external environment, but focusing on that, and I realized, at some point, that that’s all pretty futile. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. And it does come down to that sense of control. It makes sense that we want to control sleep or avoid, be able to avoid wakefulness, because it doesn’t feel good. But unfortunately, we can’t, but what we can control are our actions. And it’s our actions that can create good conditions for sleep or that can make conditions less favorable for sleep. And it’s always our actions that determine the life we want to live. And it’s always funny that when we change, maybe how much time we allot for sleep from night to night, it becomes this thing where, instead of really trying to sleep, all of a sudden, we find ourselves really trying to stay awake. Martin Reed: And just that shift can be really interesting, because then, a lot of clients I work with, suddenly, they start to feel that strong sense of sleepiness again, rather than fatigue. And often what else happens is when we find that we’re trying to stay awake, we start to feel really sleepy because we’re not trying. We get that realization that, “Oh, maybe it’s because I’ve been trying so hard to make sleep happen. That’s been the obstacle there.” So sometimes, that recognition can make it a little bit easier for us to move away from the stuff that we can’t control, and just onto the stuff we can control. Nick Hobbs: Yeah. That’s right. It becomes a slightly different preoccupation for a while there, trying to stay awake. And it does, it takes off some of that emphasis on trying to get to sleep, which I can see now is yeah, it’s really… It’s pretty deeply, why? It’s still there for me. That urge to want to force sleep and make it happen. But you said, I think just then before, it’s about the relationship you have with the way you feel and your behaviors. And so I guess it’s just a different way of allowing for that. Understanding that, of course, sleep is wired into us and the desire to sleep is wired into us. So therefore, of course, I’m going to be focused a little bit on times when I am sleep deprived or haven’t had enough sleep at least, under slept. Nick Hobbs: So yeah, I thought the window was just a stroke of genius. It was really, really helpful. And I still have a… I get up at 5:00 every morning and I get up, and that was the other thing you said. Get up at the same time and get outside, do some exercise. Wake your body up and get into your body, become aware of your body. And that’s what I did. And still to this day, I get up at 5:00. What I do in the morning is different changes over time. But the moment I get up, I go to the gym, what time I go to bed, doesn’t really matter to me so much anymore, but I’m always up at that 5:00 in the morning. I’m always out the door, down to the gym, being active and then going to work, whether I get the sleep or not. And so that was also a part of it. It’s just that commitment to just doing those things, holding that line regardless of what happens. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I just love that word that you use, commitment, because it is a commitment, because it’s difficult. Especially at first, especially in the short time, it is really difficult to do things that are important to us when we’re really struggling. And we’ve had really difficult nights, when we’ve got a lot of anxiety, or stress, or worry. It can feel very overwhelming and it is difficult to commit to doing things that are still important to us, even with all that struggle going on, and to commit to behaviors that can help. They can’t help make sleep happen, but they can help create better conditions for sleep. Like getting out of bed a reasonably consistent time in the mornings can be so helpful. If nothing else, it just prevents us from chasing sleep and just reinforcing to the brain, that wakefulness is this physical threat that must be avoided at all costs. Martin Reed: You must be alert against wakefulness, to protect me from wakefulness. And like you touched upon really early on in this conversation, it’s not unusual for things to feel worse, to feel more difficult when you step out of that comfort zone, and make these changes. For your sleep to get worse in the short term and that’s often a time when everything’s screaming at you, so just go back into your safety zone, to go back to the way things were. But the way things weren’t really helpful either. We really do have to put in a lot of commitment to make some changes and to be open, and curious to exploring new ways of thinking really to put this behind us. I think that’s what it comes down to. Nick Hobbs: And it does feel like breaking into a new space. Sleep Diaries and sleep windows, and I knew about sleep hygiene, and I went and read books, but I didn’t really have anyone like you. I’d never come across a course where you could just like engage with someone about it. Send off the diaries, get some feedback, have a discussion, and have these messages, and this education reiterated, and learn to apply something. So it did feel like a new space and in a way, a new space is a chance to reset, isn’t it? Not that I would’ve necessarily seen it like that at the time. I was just more probably just desperate. And my commitment came from just not having alternative, not really having another option, having nothing to lose really, and having everything to gain, and wanting so much to be well, and feel good. Nick Hobbs: And that was enough to start, but having someone there, having a certain level of accountability like committing, but also, right, I’m going to see this through, and yeah, I’ve got to fill out these diaries, and I’m going to send these in, and I’ve got to read the email feedback, and implement that. And that level of buy in, so to speak. Having that level of accountability, someone there, you, Martin, waiting to receive those Sleep Diaries, going through the content each week. It was just helpful as well to have that weekly structure to keep me committed, to keep me accountable to on some level to myself, that I’m doing it. Martin Reed: Yeah. It does often get more difficult in the short term, before it gets better, and often progress isn’t linear. It’s not every week, it gets better and better and better, although that can happen for most people. There’s ups and downs along the way as well. Again, so we’ll stuff this out of our control. We can only control our actions. We can control our actions on the journey to the outcome. We can’t control the outcome itself. What would you say an average night is like for you these days, Nick? Nick Hobbs: Good enough. I always generally get a pretty adequate sleep, but not always, not always. But it doesn’t really loom. It’s not the specter. Sleep’s not the specter that it was. It’s just something that I need. It’s a part of my day. It’s a part of my wellbeing, and if I get five, six hours like last night, yeah, I’ll probably go about six hours sleep. Feel good. It’s fine. It’s not something I have to really spend too much mental energy on anymore. But I do at times, for sure. Still have all of those kinds of thought patterns and conversations. Martin Reed: Yeah. I guess the changes, just your relationship with them. Sometimes we refer to it as psychological flexibility. We just become more flexible in how we choose to respond to them when we’re really trapped in the struggle. Our response is try and push them away, try to fight them, avoid them, and they can really influence our behaviors. Whereas when we get to that stage, talking to you, insomnia is just in the background now. It’s in our past. We still struggle every now and then because we’re human beings, but what’s really changed is our relationship with the sleep. With wakefulness and with thoughts, feelings, emotions. Nick Hobbs: And I think your message in the course is always to normalize, isn’t it? To normalize sleep as not necessarily being something that we all experience the same way, the same time, in the same periods of our lives, and in comparison to each other. We all have some sense of an ideal, but that’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s an ideal. And there are things that we can do that are either going to support sleep or not help. And so it’s about learning about what’s supportive and putting your energy into that, because that’s the things that you can do. So I like it. It’s a simple message, and in a way, it’s a very simple thing to understand. Not so easy to put it into practice, but that’s the art of it, isn’t it? That’s why we do the programs, that’s why we learn, and we figure it out. Nick Hobbs: So, I found it really good. And I guess that’s what I would say to people really. It’s just to stay connected to what’s important to you and persist. That’s one of the values really that keeps us going, doesn’t it? Through all of this. It’s that capacity to persist and to hold onto that is important. Because it’s hard to trust. Sometimes, it’s just really hard to trust. You can say all the things under the sun, Martin, but you have to go through the program, and you have to commit, and you have to try it, and you have to apply it, and you have to do it for yourself, and you have to find it. Nick Hobbs: That’s where the confidence comes. So the confidence is built upon that effort and it’s there. So I guess looking back now, I don’t know how long it’s been since I finished the program. I’m really not aware, but it’s been some months now, hasn’t it? Maybe a year even, and looking back, I could really just encourage people use that word, curiosity. Be curious about it, give it a go. If you can’t trust it, you don’t need to. You just need to go through the program and be open to learning, and just trying things out, and experimenting. It’s that mindset, isn’t it? Really, that you can bring in to the program. Martin Reed: Thanks again, Nick, for all the time you’ve taken to come onto the episode and just talk about your experience. I know that a lot of people are going to be finding this really helpful to hear your story in your own words. And I think they’re going to really identify with a lot of what you’ve said as well, but I got just one last question for you that I think would be just the icing on the cake for everyone listening, and it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and feels as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, that they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Nick Hobbs: You see, the dilemma it is, isn’t it? That you’re faced with something that is inside of you and there’s no real easy escape, because you keep coming back to yourself at the end of the day. And what does it mean to give up and not do anything? And you can do that, but we can’t really leave the situation. So at the end of the day, we still have to keep taking those steps. And I would just encourage people just to keep that in mind that even though we can’t trust necessarily that by doing the program, we’re going to get to what we ideally want for ourselves. Like you say, values are never something that you necessarily ever reach the end of, but we can always be taking steps towards that. Nick Hobbs: And I think there’s nothing in this program that takes me away from what’s important for me. Everything in the program really emphasizes and puts me in touch with what’s important to me. So therefore, I’m never going to be harmed by this. So I would suggest to people to please just give things a try, stay open, stay curious, and find what it is that will enable you to commit to this next six, eight weeks, and then see where one gets to. It’s a bit of an unknown process, isn’t it? It is about accepting to some degree that, that’s just the nature of where we are, and that’s just what we found ourselves doing. So I would just encourage people not to give up and I would encourage people to stay in touch with what’s important to them. And hopefully, that this program is one of those steps for them because there’ll be other steps to take too. How’s that? Martin Reed: That’s great. That’s perfect, Nick. I think that’s a great note to end on. So thank you again so much for taking the time to go onto the podcast. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Nick Hobbs: You’re welcome, Martin. Thank you. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Adam’s insomnia began the night before an important work presentation. After a really difficult night, Adam ended up calling in sick — and this planted a seed in his mind that told him that difficult nights would mean he couldn’t go through with important plans. Safety behaviors such as canceling plans or avoiding activities in order to protect his sleep helped Adam feel a bit better in the short-term but over the long-term they were preventing him from living the kind of life he wanted to live. In other words, his comfort zone became more like a prison. In this episode, Adam shares how he learned to let go of his anxiety, his anger, his fear, and his intense desire to avoid nighttime wakefulness. He also talks about the benefits of self-kindness and how he managed to separate how he slept at night from his ability to engage in things that would help him live the kind of life he wanted to live and be the kind of person he wanted to be. Today, Adam has released himself from that prison cell. He is living his life and sleeping a lot better! Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Adam, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Adam Currie: Thank you for having me. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning like I do with every single guest. Can you tell us a little bit about when your sleep problems first began and what you think triggered that initial sleep disruption? Adam Currie: Sure. Yeah, so I probably first experienced real problems with my sleep I would say about probably two, two and a half years ago. I think the trigger was I had an event where I had to present to some quite important people at work and the night before I found myself thinking about what I needed to do the next day. And I thought I’ve got an early start tomorrow and I need to be up at 5:00 AM and I’ve got the train to catch and I’ve got a taxi and I’ve got all these big things to do. And what if it goes wrong tomorrow? And I just had this kind of snowball of really quite intense negative thoughts about what would happen the day after. And I had a very difficult night. I actually had no sleep at all to the point where I actually unfortunately called in sick the next day. Adam Currie: And I felt that I couldn’t go through what I needed to go through. And that unfortunately, was then imprinted in my mind. So every time I had something like that that cropped up again in the future, I then felt the same anxiety and I was worried about whether I would sleep or not. And it was almost like the trauma of having a completely sleepless night. It had never happened to me before. And so it really made me stand up and get quite concerned, which looking back was obviously making things a lot worse for me. So yeah, probably about two years ago. Martin Reed: Yeah. So did you find the sleep got right back on track after once the event that seemed to have triggered that sleep disruption was over? Whether you went to it or not, did you find that your sleep then got back on track afterwards or did those sleep issues kind of linger for a bit? Adam Currie: They lingered for a little bit for a day or two, they did get back on track. But what I found is that the longer I had problems with sleep or rather not the longer, the longer I was not addressing the problems that I was having with sleep, the longer the impact would be and the longer it would take me to recover. So I would quite often find that one night may actually then develop into a succession of poor nights. So maybe a chain of two or three nights. Initially it did get a little bit better, but then it got worse again over time, but it always corrects itself eventually. But how quickly it corrects itself is obviously dependent on the tools that you have and how you respond to it. And my toolkit early on was just not really up to the job. Martin Reed: Yeah. So apart from the nights where you got no sleep whatsoever, when those difficult nights were lingering around, what were they like? Was it difficulty just first falling asleep or was it more to do with waking during the night and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep, or maybe it was a combination of both of those things? Adam Currie: Yeah, it was, I mean initially, and I think still predominantly the issues I have with falling to sleep, in my mind I’m just ruminating and ruminating and how that feels and how that kind of represents itself for me is lots of toting and turning, flustered, throwing the covers around. And I would be acutely aware that I wasn’t entering the first stages of sleep and then I would get frustrated and that would lead to more tossing and turning, clock watching, chronic clock watching to the point where I had to start removing the clocks in the room because I was obsessing over the time and I’d be like, well, now it’s midnight and that means I’ve only got five hours sleep and now it’s 1:00 and I’ve only got four and so on. So that’s how it manifested itself. Adam Currie: Very, very uncomfortable nights that would just snowball with anxiety. And I would end up by five or six in the morning just so anxious and actually sometimes quite frustrated as well. Frustrated that I wasn’t able to do something that I’d naturally done for the last 30 years of my life without even thinking about. And now all of a sudden it’s this big performance and it’s an act and I was just stuck. That’s probably the best way to describe it. I just frozen with an inability to sleep that was just fueled by anxiety and it would get worse every time. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think a lot of people are going to really identify with the effects of insomnia on the nights. You know, obviously there’s not much sleep going on, but it’s also just that whole struggle with the anxiety and that can manifest itself in the clock watching and this frustration, because we feel like we should be able to control this. Why can’t I make sleep happen? It’s something that I used to be able to do okay. I used to be able to sleep pretty well. Why is this not happening now? And so it all just kind of feeds into itself. So it’s not really the only struggle now is being awake at night, which is definitely a big part of it, but it’s also everything that comes with that. Right? It’s all those thoughts and those feelings and those emotions that come with it during the night. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And I completely underestimated how difficult it might be for me. It’s really funny because when I was a child, I used to play this game and I’m sure people who are listening may have played the game themselves where you try to stay awake for as long as you can and the whole goal and the aim of the game is can I stay awake all night? And I always remember failing hopelessly by about maybe 1:00 or 2:00 AM because the whole objective would stay awake. And then looking back on that now when the objective is go to sleep, it kind of has the opposite effect and I suppose I was aware of that subconsciously, but I was so fixated and focused on the idea of a perfect night’s sleep before I needed to be up early and now it’s okay to say I was failing miserably in sleeping because I was just placing such an emphasis on the ability to fall asleep. And I was lost, completely lost. Martin Reed: Yeah. You know, I think that what goes on during the nights is probably only about 50% of the struggle with chronic insomnia because we deal with all these struggles during the day as well, whether that’s just how we feel during the day or all the stuff that our mind wants to tell us during the day like, oh, you can’t do this because you had a difficult night or you should cancel those plans with friends, what’s tonight going to bring? So we are having insomnia. That’s not just a nighttime problem, it’s a daytime problem as well. So I’m curious to your thoughts on whether that was true for you too and what kind of effect insomnia was having on your daytime life as well? Adam Currie: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it definitely was having an effect on me. I feel like it wasn’t having as much of an effect on me as I was trying to lead myself to believe it was because my whole reference and frame of thought when I was really, really tired was often making things worse than they actually were. Physically, I would feel exhausted, I would feel drained.I would actually struggle to concentrate and I would feel hot and bothered quite often. And I would just want to find a soft cool nice quiet place where I could just sit down and I often used to commute via a rail. So I would have a two hour journey back home and I would find myself on the train so tired that I was falling to sleep. Adam Currie: And then obviously the worry then was, what if I don’t wake up? What if I actually fall asleep on the train and I missed my stop and I don’t get where I need to be? So no, the effects were quite negative in the day. But since having done several sleepless nights and actually done something quite successfully with little to no sleep, but with a completely different frame of mind, that was what really made me compare and contrast to how things used to be. And I think it’s mostly psychological about how if you think you’re going to fail the next day, if you tell yourself, if you positively reinforce the fact that you’re going to struggle, you tend to struggle. If you allow yourself to separate the night from the day ahead and you put the night behind you and you just move forward, there is very little difference in performance. Adam Currie: You know you’re tired, you know you feel worn down and certainly exhausted, but if you can frame it in such a way that you can catch up the next night or eventually at some point you will regain the sleep you lost, it makes things much easier. So I found that, yes, it affected me in the day, however, over time, I’m doing a better job of separating the previous night from the next day, whereas before they were inherently linked so I was setting myself up for failure from the moment I went to bed until the very next night. Martin Reed: Yeah. So looking back on your experience before you found Insomnia Coach before you found the resources that I offer and these podcasts, et cetera, what kind of things had you done to try and turn this around? Because whenever we’re faced with a problem, we want to fix it. What kind of things had you personally tried that looking back on it now, maybe they weren’t that helpful. Maybe they could have even been perpetuating the problem? Adam Currie: All of the wrong things. I did all the wrong things, all around control of sleep. So I tried peppermint oil. I tried a glass of warm milk before bed. I tried waking up at 3:30 or 4:00 AM the day before thinking that I would build up an obsolete sleep drive so I’d fall asleep easy the next night, it didn’t work. I was listening to certain sound wave frequencies in the belief that they promote relaxation and sleep. I would listen to hypnotherapy guided talk downs. I would listen to old classical music and old time radio because for some reason there’s something I felt in time was comforting about that. So I would listen to that. I would eat bananas because I’d read about high potassium content and promote sleep and reduce certain chemicals or promote certain chemicals for sleep. I’d take a hot bath, a hot shower. Adam Currie: I would watch a film, read a whole book cover to cover from say five in the afternoon until midnight. And I hope that would also promote sleepiness and I would be lying if I said any of them worked, they may have worked in isolation, although I probably think they’ll probably just coincidental. None of them had a lasting impact, otherwise, we wouldn’t be having the conversation now. So yeah, all in vain, the efforts were all in vain, but yeah, I tried so many things and that was what made it more difficult. And I think probably people listening to this, it will probably resonate with them is that the more you try and the more things you go through, the more you then start to think, okay, this is a real problem now and this is getting out of control and I’m not normal and this isn’t right, and maybe something’s really wrong with me. Adam Currie: And you limit yourself for options of how you might promote sleep. So the net closes in on you a little bit. And that obviously makes things 10 times as bad as they ever would’ve been in that frame of mind. Martin Reed: The reason I asked that question about all these things we’ve tried is definitely not to gloat or make us feel bad or to ridicule the things we do. Although on reflection, some of them can be quite amusing when we’re at that place where we can look back and think about some of the things we tried, but really it’s just to legitimize the fact that when we have a problem, we are understandably going to try and fix it. And this leads us down this path of trying all different experiments, different rituals. In other areas of life efforts can be really helpful, but with sleep, it’s just that exception to the rule the more we try just as you touched upon you took the words out of my mouth, the more we try, the more difficult it becomes. Martin Reed: So I always like to ask this question just because anyone listening can recognize that other people are in the same boat as you. They’ve been there, they’ve tried all these different things. So the fact that you are not necessarily find them helpful too is perhaps understandable and normal. It’s not a sign that your insomnia is unique or you can’t put that insomnia behind you, because at the end of the day, all these things that we usually try, they don’t really get to the root cause of what keeps insomnia alive, which is really our behaviors around sleep and how we allow sleep to influence our behaviors and our relationship with all those difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions that always come along for the ride when we’re struggling with anything. But especially when we’re struggling with chronic insomnia. Adam Currie: Definitely. And I think as humans, we tend to self stigmatize and we tend to believe that we are failing in our ability to do things and somebody else drinks peppermint tea before bed and they swear by it and they fall asleep, whereas, I can’t do that. And it can bring some other unwanted baggage with it in terms of your overall wellbeing. And I found that I was questioning my ability just to do normal things and I was questioning my ability to hold back automatic thoughts. It got to the point where I just doubted my ability to be able to wake up on a morning and say I will be able to sleep tonight because that in itself would trigger a series of competing thoughts and competing feelings about sleep. Adam Currie: And I started to develop those really negative thought habits and processes around sleep. And it’s not just isolated to sleep, I found that I would start to doubt my ability to do other things because I started to treat sleep as a performance. It was as an act, it was the start of a race I needed to be out the blocks just at the right time, not too early, not too late. And as soon as I put that kind of pressure on it definitely does affect and impact other areas of your wellbeing definitely. Martin Reed: Yeah. And those thoughts and those feelings, they’re not good to experience, right? Nobody likes to experience them so that natural human inclinations to try and suppress them to try and fight them, to avoid them, maybe distract ourselves, to think positive, all those attempts to control how we’re thinking and how we’re feeling, ultimately, they’re doomed to backfire at some point because we just can’t control how we feel. You know, sometimes the brain will generate thoughts and feelings that makes us feel good. Sometimes it’ll generate thoughts and feelings that don’t make us feel good. It’s when we get trapped in that struggle trying to control them, which is completely understandable because they don’t feel good that we tend to get the most trapped. I like to think of it as that the brain dangles this hook with these difficult thoughts and these feelings, it can hook us and jerk us around and throw us down this path where we end up doing things that move us away from the kind of life we live rather than toward the kind of life we want to live. Adam Currie: Such a good analogy, yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. Then we’re stuck with the insomnia. We’re still stuck with the difficult thoughts and the feelings, but then we’re also stuck with moving away from the kind of life we want live, which just compounds our struggle. So I’m curious, how were you able to change your relationship with all those thoughts and those emotions like the stress, the worry and the anxiety? Adam Currie: Well, it’s a good question and I’m still working it out. I’m still perfecting that, but I’ve definitely improved and I’ve definitely solved most of the problems, but I suppose the best way to phrase it is just letting go, letting go of the anxiety, letting go of the anger and frustration of being unable to sleep, letting go of the fear that would wrap around you for the rest of the day about your inability to perform. Letting go of the fear of what other people might think about you and how you live your life and or how you perform or how you do certain tasks the day after. I really think that was the most liberating thing. But propping that thought process up for me was, and this was something that I was drawn to so strongly in your emails and your support was identifying that not falling to sleep for an evening or maybe for a few hours is not the end of the world. Adam Currie: You can still perform, you can still live a normal life. You should live a normal life irrespective of what happens in your place of sleep the night before. And so I think it was breaking the chain between what happened in bed the night before and what I then did the next day. That was really really key to me solving most of the problem. And the truth is I still do have bad nights even fairly recently, just a couple of weeks ago, I went to Venice and the first night struggled because I couldn’t sleep the night before because I was getting a flight early, but rather than worry and panic and say, will I miss my flight? What if I can’t drive to the airport? Adam Currie: You know, I was quite relaxed about it and I actually did get a couple of hours sleep in, but it was again just stopping yourself, stopping the cup from overflowing and just recognizing it is filling up and then separation and letting go of the water that’s pouring in and just step back from it and exercise and control, keep a containment on the thoughts and then allow the process to go on and know that at the right time and under the right conditions, your body will provide you with the state that it needs. Adam Currie: So it was absolutely breaking that thought process that was key because without that, I couldn’t then implement some of the other additional techniques that obviously you may talk about shortly, but that was critical for me was just breaking that chain and refusing to allow myself to continue to make the problem worse and recognize that I was making the problem worse by trying to assume control over a situation I have no control over. Martin Reed: So is that what you meant by letting go? It was just no longer just trying to fight or change all the stuff that’s going on in your mind, just recognizing that it’s happening, it’s going on, and then just shifting your attention on to what you can control, like your actions like going to Venice, for example? Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And actually not necessarily inviting difficult evenings, but expecting them sometimes. So I say, I know I’m going to probably struggle to sleep because I need to be up at 4:00 AM. I need to get to the airport for a 7:00 AM flight. I don’t normally go to sleep until 11:00 PM. I’m probably going to struggle. And even if I did fall asleep at 11:00, I’m still not going to get her for eight hours anyway. So why worry? You will find other opportunities the next evening or even after to regain that. So yeah, letting go of that was absolutely critical just allowing it to happen and releasing control over things that I’d artificially tried to control for the last two years. Martin Reed: Yeah. Yeah. And I think looking back on your life in a hundred years from now, you’re probably going to be more likely to remember, for example, that trip to Venice than how you slept like the night before or how you slept while you were on that trip. Because although we can’t downplay this, insomnia, it doesn’t make us feel good. Everyone wants to get rid of it. But at the end of the day, it’s our actions that are the primary contributor to the kind of life we live. We could be the world’s greatest sleeper, but if we’re not engaged in actions that are aligned with our values, we’re not doing stuff that’s meaningful to us that gives our lives a sense of enrichment and joy, then we are not going to live the kind of life we want to live regardless of the insomnia. Martin Reed: So if we can turn that on its head and we don’t necessarily have to do huge things, we can take baby steps if that feels more appropriate if we’re really struggling. But if we can just ensure that we engage in something each day that’s aligned with our values and it just keeps us moving toward the kind of life we want to live, instead of allowing all those thoughts and feelings to jerk us around and push us away from the kind of life we want to live, it can be really, really helpful and really help separate us our thought processes and our feelings from our actions, because our actions are really key. That’s really what helps us live the kind of life you want to live. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. I 100% agree. And I found myself originally engaging in some really quite difficult avoidance behavior. If I thought that I was going to struggle or I did struggle the night before and I had an engagement somewhere, I’d say, oh, I’ll meet you guys late because I thought that I would then stay at home and catch up on some sleep. And I felt so traumatized from the night before I couldn’t sleep anyway. So not only was I missing out on, like you say, meaningful events in my life, whether it was socializing or doing things, but I was also fixated on my issues with sleep. And the truth is that when you refuse to engage those thoughts and you just draw a line under the evening and try not to think about it again, you haven’t got a point of reference for how you feel physically. Adam Currie: So you just go through your day and you do the things you want to do and then you treat the next night as a new one and it was like a paradigm shift for me mentally because I could not come out of that place, I could not uncouple those two things. And when you were speaking, it just reminded me of one evening I was struggling so bad and I think it was a couple of evenings after I found you and what you do. I remember watching a video. It was actually one of your earlier podcasts I think. And that on its own was enough to promote sleep for me just because I realized that I wasn’t alone, this doesn’t happen to just me and that on its own was enough to help me rationalize what was happening. Adam Currie: And the next morning I thought, what was it about the video that maybe fall asleep? Was it the video? Was it the people’s voices? And it was just the relief of knowing that this isn’t going to kill you and you are not unique and you are not alone, that was enough to give me the comfort to calm my thoughts down and promote sleep quite quickly. So yeah that on its own was giving me the ability to live a meaningful life. Just knowing that I wasn’t alone, whether I slept or not, didn’t matter. But as long as I knew that I wasn’t alone and hearing other people’s stories, I was like that’s me and that’s what I do, and that was a relief almost. It was a relief that there’s a possible way out of this and it isn’t unique to you. Martin Reed: Yeah. And that’s why I love doing these podcast episodes. And I’m so grateful for guests like yourself coming on because it can be so powerful. I mean, it’s one thing for me to be here, just talking about in insomnia, but it’s such a different thing to have guests on talking about their own experience, talking about the transformation that they made, because it gives us hope, it gives us reassurance. And like you said, it helps us realize that our insomnia isn’t unique and as individuals, we’re definitely unique and our circumstances around it might be unique, but insomnia itself, it’s the same animal from person to person and the way it affects us is the same, and the way it doesn’t respond to certain things is the same. And that can be so encouraging to hear in people’s own words, because it helps us realize that if these people had the same problem as me and they were able to put it behind them, then there’s no reason why I can’t do the same. There’s always that light at the end of the tunnel. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And I’ve actually stopped referring to myself now as having insomnia. I believe that just that on its own, it’s not denial, it’s kind of an empowerment. I’m empowering myself not to identify as having a problem with sleep. I have problems with evenings sometimes. Sometimes I struggle to fall to sleep. I try not to identify as an insomniac or us having insomnia because I feel that labels me in such a way where I then expect things like that to happen more frequently. And the truth is they will happen for the rest of my life, probably they will continue to happen, but it’s how you respond to it and doesn’t it stop you from, or what does it stop you from doing now is a lot less now than it ever used to. Adam Currie: So I’m hopeful that I’ll just continue to break that separation and yeah, just keep discovering new techniques, but sticking to the core and core teachings, if you like, of your program. It was genuinely at the time I felt like it was a total relief, finding it, nothing had worked. And I know I’m probably saying the same things over and over again, but I keep going back to that point, just the realization of I found something that finally makes sense and that I could finally understand what’s going on and what the problem is and the triangle. And I just couldn’t understand it before. So yeah, it was genuinely life-changing. At the time I was in such a difficult place and it was genuinely life-changing at the time. Adam Currie: And I still regularly talk about that period of time where I found you and found what you do and found the techniques. And I often find myself trying to coach others who also have trouble sleeping. And it’s funny when you talk about problems with sleep, you start hearing everybody saying, well, I have trouble with sleep as well. And well, I can’t stay asleep and I start talking about these techniques that I couldn’t have dreamt of understanding, let alone talking about a few years ago. Martin Reed: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is helpful to move away from that label that, we give ourselves so many different labels. Right? And so when we’re struggling within insomnia, I have insomnia I’m an insomniac and yeah, but I mean, we are not trying to trick ourselves and say, no, the insomnia doesn’t exist and it’s all in my mind, but we are more than that. You know, there’s more to us than how we sleep. There’s more to us than what’s going on in our minds. They’re just a part of the whole package of the human experience but when we’re struggling with insomnia, it’s really easy to label ourselves with that and have this really difficult connotation with it. We can use it as justification for those away moves, like I can’t go into work now. Martin Reed: I can’t meet up with friends now, I can’t do this, this, this now because of the insomnia. So I think removing that label, that identity, it’s almost like a symptom of we are moving on from this now, we’re just going to expand open ourselves up to look around and to observe that maybe we are more than just the insomnia. Yeah, the insomnia’s there, but I’m also a parent, I’m also a working professional. I’m also a comedian with so much more, there’s much more to what makes us, us than just the insomnia. So it’s funny, you said that because a lot of people have mentioned that shifting and just dropping that label has been really helpful. Adam Currie: Absolutely. And look, if anyone listening wants an example of how damaging it can be to hold onto those kind of labels. About 18 months ago, I was offered, what is my dream job. It was international travel. So I would’ve had to have flown to America three or four times, five times a year. I would’ve had to have flown to the far east China and Japan and south America. I would’ve been doing exceptionally interesting work with really, really talented people. I declined the offer of the job because I was worried that having to get up early and get on a plane and travel or going to a hotel would disrupt my sleep. So I actually decided to withdraw from an opportunity that would’ve been a dream job because I was limiting myself to that label. Adam Currie: So anyone listening who might be thinking about panning themselves in or giving themselves a life which isn’t as enriching as it could be because of a label like that, THAT sometimes it’s worthwhile to see how far that can sometimes impact you negatively. And I regret that massively and looking back, I understand why I rejected the job. But it was on floored grounds completely. And that’s just an example really of what you can miss out on if you allow yourself to be penned in and labeled like that, it’s not based on reality at all. Martin Reed: That’s really powerful to hear you say that. And like you touched upon, it’s completely understandable why we make those decisions when we’re really caught up in that struggle and we’re really tangled up in it and we have this really strong connection between what’s going on, like what we’re struggling with and how that is going to dictate our behaviors but it doesn’t have to. But I like how you refer to it as like this paradigm shift because often we have to hear it many times over. Because it’s one thing to hear that there’s more to us than our thoughts, for example, there’s more to us than how we feel, that our thoughts and our feelings don’t always have to dictate our behaviors, we can’t control sleep. We can’t control what’s going on in our mind, but we can always control our actions, things like that. Martin Reed: They sound good to hear and they can be reassuring or some people might just think this is ridiculous what you’re saying, but gradually, when you hear it a few different times maybe in other people’s words and other reason why it’s great to have guests like you on talking in your own words is it can slowly start to make a little bit of sense. And then if we can start taking those baby steps, we just start making some moves toward the kind of life we want to live even after difficult nights or even when we’re really struggling with our thoughts and our feelings, that can really help make that big shift occur. And that’s what I hear time and time again from clients that have gone through this big transformation, it’s that recognition that look, there are things in my life I can’t control. Martin Reed: Unfortunately, that means that there’s going to be struggle in my life, there’s going to be pain in my life, but at the same time, I still do have control over my actions. So even in the presence of that pain and that struggle, there are still some things I can do to bring some joy to my life, to bring some enrichment to my life and just keep me on that path of moving toward the kind of life I want to live, even in the presence of all that difficult stuff. Adam Currie: Definitely. And I think meaning is really important. And when I look back on the times I’ve struggled with sleep, it’s usually preceding an event that has some meaning in my life. And if I look back at all of the nights before, the next day where I’ve obviously been deprived of sleep, they have been some of the most meaningful days of my life. I’ve got married on days where I’ve struggled to sleep the night before, I’ve been in far fun places on holiday where I’ve not slept the night before. I’ve had long days out with friends and I’ve been to weddings, all the things that happen in my life that have real meaning and have brought me real happiness I’ve actually done whilst I’ve been sleep deprived. So in some ways, when I struggle with sleep, I try to treat it as a precursor to something that’s going to be good and try to treat it more as an excitement and try to change my feeling around the emotion. Adam Currie: Because I lie in bed and I’ve got adrenaline and my stomach’s churning, but then the same thing happens before I get on a plane somewhere or a rollercoaster, I’m in an excitable state. So I’m trying to reframe the thought being one thing, well, actually, maybe I’m just excited about what’s going to happen tomorrow. And maybe I’m just thinking about all the good things that can happen and I’m getting swept up. I mean, I’m lucky and unlucky, I’m lucky in the sense that my wife is very supportive and she’s always there to listen to me when I’m projecting and I’m worried and I’m saying things that might not help sleep, she’s there to keep the checks and balances there and check me back. But I’m unlucky in the sense that if they handed out gold medals for sleepers, she would be in the running for one, she’s the kind of person that can just get into bed and then immediately is in some form of deep sleep. Adam Currie: And sometimes I watch her get into bed and I actually watch what happens and watch her lie down and then she’s gone. And I just look at that on with such envy and that consumption and I’ve heard this on your podcast before that sometimes makes it even worse because you’re like, why can’t I do that? How did you do that? I feel like waking up and saying, what did you just do that? How did you do that? And sometimes it makes it worse, but you can’t pick and choose your partners on their ability to sleep. You pick and choose your partners because of who you love. And fortunate, for me, my wife, when she’s awake is really understanding and she helps me get through it quite a lot. Adam Currie: And she helps me reframe some of the thoughts and some of the feelings I have around it. And I used to wake her up in the night when I couldn’t sleep and looking back, it was quite a selfish behavior, but I used to wake her up because I was in distress and I would wake her up and say I can’t sleep and I’m having real trouble, but it took me a while to recognize and even fairly recently recognize that behavior doesn’t lead me to sleep, it’s just me trying to give someone else my problem in the hope that it fixes the problem. And of course, it doesn’t. So that’s when I learned about getting out of bed and going downstairs and putting the lights on dim light and reading. And I weed myself off my reliance on my partners to hold the burden, if that makes sense. So I’m standing alone with it now, if you like. Martin Reed: Yeah. So like you said, it can be a blessing and a curse, right? When it seems to be that everyone I speak to with chronic insomnia has the best sleeping bed partners in the world and it can lead to that resentment, but also it can be that opportunity to just speak to that person. All right. When you go to bed, when you lie down, what do you think about, what do you do to make sleep happen? And you’re probably going to just get this blank stare, this blank look, I don’t know, because that’s how sleep happens. We do nothing, and it’s when we try doing something for sleep to happen that we get caught up in that struggle. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And obviously, in your emails and the teachings and the theory, I fail to believe or understand the two mechanisms for sleep. You talk about you need enough sleep drive and you need a lack of arousal. And if those two elements balance, you will have the right environment or the right conditions for sleep. And in my mind, I was just never cracking the lack of arousal state. I was definitely building up sleep drive because I was having three or four nights in a row where I might have only had two or three hours or one hour or nothing the night before, plenty of sleep drive, but such was the power of the state of the arousal. And I was in such a heightened state of arousal and negative frame of mind that was enough to tip the scales in favor of arousal, but it was understanding that, and I didn’t know that was happening at the time. Adam Currie: I probably knew subconsciously something like that was going on, but it wasn’t until someone had spelled it out for me and put it in black and white and I understood it for what it was. I think that was the paradigm shift. It was understanding that, understanding that those are the two conditions you need and then feeling incredibly stupid about all the gimmicks that I look back on now that I tried to try to control that. And like you say, quite often, great sleepers, they don’t know how to answer the question, because when I ask my wife, she says, I lie down and I close my eyes and then it’s the morning. It’s the day after then. It’s like, yeah, but what did you do? It’s like I did this and of course, because they have no arousal, no preconceptions or feelings or thoughts or expectations about sleep. Adam Currie: They just have this well ingrained habit where they lie down, they close their eyes and they go to sleep and it’s not as easy for everyone to achieve that. But yeah, it’s understanding that was massively key to improving my thoughts and about how I approach sleep. I talked about my wedding too a couple of times, that was key for me. I actually did sleep for about four or five hours a night before I got married. And of all the things I’ve done in my life, getting married was way up there on the nervousness scale. Martin Reed: Yeah. Adam Currie: But actually I got more sleep on that night before than I had on other nights where comparatively the next day was very low stakes and the difference between the two was I was more prepared to let go the night before I got married than I was on other days. And that’s the common denominator is my ability to let go of those thoughts. Martin Reed: Yeah. Adam Currie: And just say, what will be? I think you actually told them the night before, very few people will sleep. I think you may have said that. I think you said you didn’t sleep very well the night. Martin Reed: Yeah, no, I didn’t sleep very well the night before my wedding, I think a lot of people would experience the same thing. And the thing is like, for people that have never gone through the struggle with sleep, they just kind of recognize all right, it’s a difficult night, but they would never kind of contemplate all right now I can’t get married. Or the wedding is just going to be a disaster they’ll just be like, oh, it’s just one of those nights and they’ll just still go on with their plans. But when we’ve really been caught up in this struggle within insomnia, really, it changes things. Right? Martin Reed: Because now we’re like, am I still going to be able to do this? Am I still going to be able to do whatever I’ve got planned for the day? Am I still going to be able to live the kind of life I want to live? And I think that’s where the real fear, the real arousal, the real struggle comes from because we see insomnia or we see nighttime wakefulness as this obstacle to us living the kind of life we want to live, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Adam Currie: Definitely. And like you say, it’s what you do in that time where you are awake that makes the difference. When I started, it was tossing and turning and throwing the blankets around. I would sit up in bed and I actually have this very vivid memory of being set up in my bed with my head in my undies, just in despair going, it’s like 5:00 AM, I’ve been lining bed since 10:00 PM. What on earth is going on with me? What is happening? And I would just pace up and down the room and then get back. So all of the things that makes sleep less likely I was doing versus now where if I know I start to feel uncomfortable, I just get out of bed and I go downstairs and read a book for 20 minutes, half an hour and I’ll try again. Adam Currie: And quite often that cycle will happen two or three times. Sometimes I won’t make it, I’ll get downstairs and I’ll read a book or pop the television on and I won’t make it back upstairs because I would’ve actually fallen asleep on the sofa. You know? So I’ve done the job, although that’s not the design sometimes that happens and sometimes you think, well, at least I got the sleep I needed, but yeah, it’s how you spend that time awake now. And I’m not saying that I find it incredibly comfortable when I’m awake and that I can think clearly, because still now it frustrates me and I can get anxious about it. Martin Reed: Yeah. Adam Currie: But I now no longer allow it to say, okay, this is now a deal breaker on the day after, because that’s just now off the table. Even if I don’t sleep, it’s no longer on the table skipping in the next day. And when you commit to that, life is a lot easier in general sleep then becomes easier because sleep now doesn’t have an impact on what you do the next day. It’s almost like reverse psychology. It’s like, well, you can sleep if you want, it makes no difference because you’re still doing this. So you can either do it with eight hours sleep or do it with none, it doesn’t matter, your choice. Martin Reed: Yeah. And yeah, I think the arousal side of the equation that heightened arousal that can temporarily suppress sleep is important. I think it’s important to emphasize that we are not saying as soon as there’s somewhere else or like sleep’s just never going to happen. Often what can happen is it’s our battle with everything that’s going on in our mind. You know? So I always like to say, it’s not necessarily, for example, anxiety, it’s not necessarily just because we’re experiencing anxious thoughts that means that we’re doomed to a night of wakefulness, it’s often our battle with that anxiety, we’re trying to fight it, we’re trying to push it away, we’re trying to think about something else, that requires so much mental effort that sleep becomes almost impossible once we’ve become engaged in that battle. Martin Reed: And I think that also contributes to so many of the symptoms we associate with all the time we spending awake like the fatigue, the brain fog, lack of alertness, lack of concentration. I think a lot of it is influenced by that battle we’re engaged in rather than it being exclusively a symptom of long periods of time of wakefulness. Adam Currie: Yeah. 100%. Yeah. And it’s kind of similar to how you framed it earlier and the analogy you used. It’s like, I picture my sleep as like Niagara falls, that’s how I was looking at it and I would see something interesting in the falls and I would want to grab ahold of something, that would be a thought like you’re not going to sleep tonight or I think you might have problems tonight. And I would almost compulsively grab hold of that and once you’re in the rapid, you’re gone, it’s very hard to swim back against the current to get out. And eventually you fall over the edge. And that is how it was with me until eventually I could then stand on the shore and just look at the rapid instead and I know it was there and I make the choice do I go in and grab the fish or not? Adam Currie: And yeah, every night I have that discussion almost with myself. I have to remind myself not to put my hand in the rapids. Sometimes I do, I’m only human. I’m not perfect. Sometimes I will succumb to that because I don’t know what your experience is with other people, but sometimes I would find those thoughts to be quite invasive, I would, for no reason whatsoever, the night before I’m just getting into bed with nothing happening the next day at all. I would decide to tell myself for some strange reason that, I don’t know why, I might struggle tonight. And that was enough to then set the chain reaction off. It’s incredible how impactful that kind of thinking can be. So it’s just about learning how to counteract that thought and separate that thought. Adam Currie: And like you say, come away from it and engage in something else and you can’t control how you think about something, but you control how you respond to that thought. And I think that’s the key. Martin Reed: I love that analogy that you shared. Did you say you just kind of visualized those thoughts as fish was it in the river that were swimming by? Adam Currie: Yes. Martin Reed: I love that. Adam Currie: I use Niagara falls because it’s rapid and then you fall off the edge and if you stay in there too long, eventually you get to the point where you can’t swim back and then when you fall off, it’s like that’s the night done then. So my thought was, can I get out of the rapids before I fall over the edge? But yeah, the fish were like, I’m not going to sleep or the fish were, you are going to struggle tomorrow or the fish were, oh, you don’t have to do that. That was how I saw it. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. And you’ve got all those different thoughts, all those different fish in the water that are all swimming by, some might swim right in front of you for a really long time. Some might just go whizzing right past some might disappear and then come back around again. If we can just get to that point though, where we’re just observing that happen rather than falling over the edge, as you said, just getting caught up in the rapids, just trying to grab all these fish and throw them out of the river, it just becomes a lot easier. Doesn’t it? It’s just like we’re abandoning that struggle. We’re using that phrase of letting go like that you’ve been saying. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And in my experience of having insomnia now or having trouble with sleep rather for the last probably three or four years, I’m honest with myself, the real exhausting thing about insomnia isn’t the lack of sleep, it’s the battle and the thoughts that you have to deal with. And it’s the journey you take yourself on and the hard time that you give yourself as well in many senses, that’s what’s really tiring. It’s not the lack of sleep because you can prove to yourself you can be incredibly effective without sleep. It’s just the thoughts that come along with it, which are really exhausting. And the worry, I remember, I don’t know if you do recall but my real worry was about health. I was thinking, will I have a heart attack if I don’t sleep for three days? And you read all sorts of things online about your chance of developing diabetes and hypertension and all these awful medical conditions, which of course, makes it even worse. Adam Currie: And the truth is that I’m sure that there’s no real link to lots of these things, but of course, if you just keep reading, that makes it worse. Anyway, so my worry was about what it was doing to my health. So that’s the paradox, isn’t it? Is that you need to sleep to look after your health, but you can’t. And when you are sleepless, you start Googling, how bad is it if I don’t sleep? And of course, they say, oh, it’s quite bad. And you’re like, that’s even worse. And of course, it just send spirals. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. And the interesting thing is that there’s no clinical studies that have found insomnia causes any health condition whatsoever. And one of the biggest studies that have been done that looked at the role of chronic insomnia on mortality I think it involved like 37 million people from all different studies and they found that there was no link. There was no link to between people that had chronic insomnia and an increased risk of mortality. It was the same across the board, but yet we see all these studies and these newspaper articles that find associations and it comes down to that example of if someone has an ashtray in their house, maybe they’re more likely to develop cancer, but is that because they got an astray in their house or is it because they smoke or is there something else that’s causing that? There’s this cause and effect and associations never show causality. So we find all these associations and then because headlines need to attract attention. The ones that don’t really sound exciting like chronic insomnia does not increase your risk of mortality may tend to not get much attention. Adam Currie: I hate newspapers where they have those kind of headlines. Martin Reed: Yeah. And one that finds that can used in a way that comes up with a great headline or that might attract more research funding, they’re the ones that get all the attention. And it is a shame because, like you said, when we are struggling with chronic insomnia, we are doing more research about sleep. We’re going to be coming across all these articles that are saying scary stuff and that just puts more pressure on ourselves to sleep. It increases that arousal we’re dealing with more struggle then. And we get tangled up in that struggle even more. It’s like more pieces of rope around us that we get tangled up in. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And it fuels the obsession with sleep, that’s what I found. I became so obsessed about the science of sleep, and again, it was all just to try to have some kind of control, the more you look into these studies and the more you read, like you say, the more rope you surround yourself with the more difficult it is to let go. And yeah, it became a real obsession. Sleep for me became I could have studied a PhD in sleep. That’s what it felt like for the month that I had my first major episode. I was doing everything I could to rest control and the more information that came in the further I was away from realizing what it was I needed to do. It was actually an absence of information that I needed. Adam Currie: It was, again, things that would take my arousal away. But unfortunately, when you are in the midst of it and you haven’t got this benefit position of hindsight here, that’s just what you do. And I’m sure you hear it all the time. And again, anyone that’s listening who’s watching this or listening to this and is in that place right now, know that too much information and too much fixation and focus around the mechanics of sleep does not help you sleep. It never helps me sleep ever. In fact, it actively stopped me from sleeping. No good becoming an expert in sleep if you can’t get to sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. That’s a great point. And I think it becomes even more problematic when we’re using that time that we could be engaged in actions that are more important to us in terms of living a life aligned with our values and doing things that we personally enjoy and find enriching. Often we can substitute all that stuff with that ongoing research and research itself. I mean, some research is probably helpful, but when it becomes that obsession and it kind of consumes our life, that’s when it can become really counterproductive. Martin Reed: We talked a lot about all these different behaviors that we implement some helpful, some less helpful, I think just to summarize the stuff that you’ve said has been helpful for you was that letting go, just abandoning that struggle with thoughts, feelings, nighttime wakefulness, and sleep itself, engaging in actions that are meaningful for you. Independently of sleep and even in the presence of all those fish running down the river. And then you touched upon just doing things to help create good conditions for sleep, better conditions for sleep as well. For example, like not trying to chase sleep by going to bed before you’re actually feeling sleepy. And if you’re really tossing and turning during the night, really struggling, if that wakefulness is feeling really unpleasant, just doing something that can help make that wakefulness more pleasant, whether that’s reading a book or watching TV, it really doesn’t matter. Martin Reed: Those things we do at night can be so helpful too, because they also train the brain that wakefulness, although we don’t really want to experience it, it’s not actually like a physical danger or a threat to us. It’s not the same thing as a 400 pound grizzly bear waiting for us in our bed at night. It’s not going to physically harm us. So if we can just embrace that weight from us to make it more pleasant, not only does that make the nights a little bit better, because we’re awake anyway, let’s make them a bit more pleasant, but they also train the brain to realize that this wakefulness isn’t a danger or a threat, it’s not something it has to stay alert for to try and protect us from. And that alertness in turn makes sleep more difficult. I just wanted to summarize because I know we covered a lot of stuff. Was there anything else that you had to add to that I maybe missed out on or anything you wanted to clarify? Adam Currie: No, I think you’ve done a good job of summarizing that, a much better job than I have. But then again, you’ve just been listening to me waffle on for the last hour. Martin Reed: Exactly. I have the easy part. Adam Currie: Yeah, exactly. But no, I think you’ve covered that quite well. And I suppose the only thing I would add is every time I have issues with sleep, every time I have a problematic night, I strengthen the healthier relationship of the understanding of what the problem is. So I try to reframe that. Every night I struggle, I get closer to less struggles in the future because I understand what’s happening and it was learning to show some sort of compassion for yourself as well. Martin Reed: Yeah. Adam Currie: I talked before about self stigma. I found myself incredibly frustrated at myself and the kind of language I would use with myself mentally I would, oh, I hate how you can’t sleep. That’s the kind of feeling and thoughts you would have and it’s not only unhelpful for sleep, it’s also very damaging to your self-esteem and self-confidence as well. So it’s showing yourself some love and compassion and understanding about when you are in those wakeful states. I just try to tell myself, oh, you’re having trouble again, but don’t worry, you’ve been there before. Everything’s going to be okay, it’s fine. Just go and do something and come back. Adam Currie: And you know what? If you don’t fall back to sleep, it’s not the end of the world, just carry on. And it’s showing yourself that compassion. And I talked before about information stream and looking too much. Information is good when the source of it is controlled and the stream of it is controlled. That’s why I found your emails so massively helpful because the right information was coming to me on the right cadence. And it was the right intensity. And I wasn’t trying to control the information. It was nuggets of information coming through that were really easy to understand on a cyclical nature that then it was almost like rhythmic and maybe that’s by design. Adam Currie: It’s like circadian almost, you wake up in the morning and you’re like, oh, here’s some information that you should know about sleep. And that was my ritual. I would wake up in the morning and it’d be like week one, week two. And it was almost becoming part of my routine, but information is good when you get it from the right sources and it’s controlled in the right cadence. Martin Reed: Yeah. That’s great. And I love that you talked about being kind to yourself, because that is really important because it is difficult to go through this, it is important to be kind to ourselves. Often we are really kind to other people when they’re going through a struggle, but we don’t turn that inward on ourselves when we’re going through struggle and pain. And that is important to recognize too. We don’t want to sugar coat it, what we’re going through is hard, we need to acknowledge that and be kind to ourselves. And I love how you talked about when I have these difficult nights now they’re opportunities and their opportunities to recognize, oh, there’s no mystery here, I know exactly why this is happening and there are opportunities to implement things that just help train your brain that yeah, this wakefulness, it’s not dangerous, it’s not a threat. Martin Reed: There are things I can do to make this wakefulness more pleasant. And then the next day when I’m awake, I can still do these things that help me live that kind of life. I got that opportunity to once again, prove to myself that because I spent time awake at night, it doesn’t have to move me away from the kind of life I want to live. Adam Currie: That’s right. Martin Reed: So it’s okay to feel these things, but we don’t have to be hard on ourselves when we have these difficult nights, they can be seen too as opportunities to reinforce what we’re learning and to practice this things that can help us over the longer term too training the brain that wakefulness isn’t a threat or a danger. Adam Currie: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think some really great advice I was once given is treat yourself like you are someone who you are responsible for looking after. And that was really helpful for me to think that you externalize and think you would help someone else the same way. So treat yourself like you are someone else who are you who you are responsible for looking after, that was really helpful for me, because it made me think of myself as somebody else. So I was less interested in stigmatizing myself and more interested in nurturing myself and caring for myself and that made a huge difference. Yeah. It actually probably did make me sleep better as well. But if it didn’t, I was kinder to myself and it would promote the chances of sleep that the next opportunity, whether it was the next night or night after, so yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well that’s great. Well, Adam, I really appreciate all the time you’ve taken out your day to come on and we’ve covered so much great stuff. I’m sure that everyone listening to this is going to get some kind of value fr from it. But there’s always this one question that I ask everyone. So I don’t want you to feel left out. So I’m going to ask this question for you if you feel comfortable just hanging on for a couple of more minutes to answer it. It’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything that they’re just beyond help, they can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Adam Currie: I would tell them that they are closer to a good night’s sleep than they could ever imagine. And that the things that are separating them from a good night’s sleep are actually easily removed. And they’re not things that require monumental or Titanic efforts or lots of money or lots of fads and gimmicks and supplements, it’s straightforward healthy thinking and reframing your relationship with how you spend your time in your bed. It’s as simple as that. Martin Reed: All right. Great. Well, I think that’s a wonderful note to end on. So thanks again for coming on Adam. I really appreciate it. Adam Currie: You’re welcome. Thanks very much for having me, I appreciate it. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) As Juergen got older, his sleep began to change. Although this is normal, Juergen didn’t know that at the time! And, just as he began to pay more attention to sleep, COVID hit, work stress increased, and all the places he used to enjoy going to got shut down. Juergen felt as though insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it were starting to control his life. He felt as though he was losing himself and getting pulled away from the kind of life he wanted to live. This was when we started working together. Ultimately, Juergen became more willing to experience nighttime wakefulness. He became more accepting of the difficult thoughts and feelings that would show up. Juergen discovered that as long as he didn’t try to battle with all the stuff that was out of his control he could free up all that energy to do things that would help him live the kind of life he wanted to live instead. The skills Juergen learned and repeatedly practiced also helped when tinnitus returned after a long absence. Today, Juergen can notice when he’s getting distracted by his thoughts and feelings and is better able to disengage autopilot, bring himself back to the present moment, and refocus attention onto the actions he can control — actions that help him be the kind of person he wants to be and help him live the kind of life he wants to live, even in the presence of difficult thoughts and feelings and even after difficult nights. As a result, all the difficult stuff that is out of his control now has far less of an influence over his life — and he is also sleeping a lot better! Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hello, Juergen. Thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Juergen Kuhmann: Yeah, sure. Thank you for having me and for inviting me. Can’t believe I’m on your podcast after having viewed so many of them when I was in the middle of it. Thank you very much. Martin Reed: Oh, absolutely. You’re not the first person to say that. Feels like a journey where you just go full circle, right? You listen and then eventually you know you’ve made it when you come onto the podcast yourself. Juergen Kuhmann: Maybe that’s the circle. Not of life! Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. Well, let’s start right at the beginning. When did your sleep problems first begin? And what do you think caused those initial sleep issues? Juergen Kuhmann: I think it was a combination of things. I think, first of all I didn’t even realize how sleep would change when I get older. So at that time I was close to 50, and in the onset to it, I was starting to think about my sleep more because I said, “Oh no, I only got this many hours or that many hours.” And then so already there was, at the end of 2019, already starting. And then at beginning of 2020, I had a healthy event. Nothing big. I had a really bad tooth they couldn’t fix. Treatments and so on, I had this pain and infection in my head. Juergen Kuhmann: You make up stories about how this you this infection is there and it’s not going to get fixed. They couldn’t fix it after so many hours in the dentist’s chair and so that was bothering me during that time. Then I had a bunch of work stress and then COVID hit. So, which means my outlet was always sports and just swimming and skiing. I’m in in Colorado, and so once COVID hit, they closed the ski area, they closed the pool, so I was home with my work stress and my health problems and that’s where it started. I just said, “Man, how am I going sleep?” And I’m just ruminating and I didn’t have the outlet. I think that was one of the big causes. Martin Reed: Yeah. So I think probably you recognized that when you were going through that initial health issue with your teeth, your mouth. You probably didn’t think quite so much was wrong when you experienced some initial sleep disruption at that point, because most of us can recognize when something stressful or unpleasant happens we tend to have some difficult nights from time to time as a result. How did it progress? So how did you go from, “Oh, this is okay, it’s some temporary sleep disruption caused by this,” to, “Oh, I think there’s something more serious going on here. This seems to be a real problem.” Juergen Kuhmann: The health problem started in January, the work stress, like many people, the corporations, that companies said then, “Okay, this is COVID times, pandemic times, all this change, we have to change our story.” I work for a software company so we had to adjust to, how do our customers now want to do business with us? We want to help them. They changed their business on the spot, so how can we help them? So there was a lot of stress at work to make that switch. And so that was going like February, March of 2020, then they closed everything. And then I think it was April or so, I had this one super bad night where I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to keep my wife awake. And so, “Okay, I’ll sleep downstairs,” and I didn’t sleep at all that whole night. Juergen Kuhmann: The next day we wanted to go on a drive and get something done but I had to be fit for that and I wasn’t. I said, “Now I can’t even on my free day when I should not worry about work, I worry about other things so much now I can’t sleep. And so that was the trigger, this compelling event, I guess where I said, “Something’s really wrong. I need to get help.” Martin Reed: So what was that sleep disruption like for you? Was it difficulty just falling asleep at the start of the night or maintaining the sleep through the night? Or maybe a little bit of both? Juergen Kuhmann: I think mainly falling asleep. So just ruminating on thoughts and trying to stay in control, trying to control my thoughts, because I said, “Oh, now I’m going to think about sleep again.” And I’m so tired I want to sleep, but now this thought comes up again, “Don’t think about that.” So this, trying to be the control freak on things, as we talked before, right? Engineering background, we are known to analyze problems and trying to find solutions for it. And I couldn’t find the solution for it. And trying to find a solution for it, things just progressed to being worse. The methods I used to go through life and fix things didn’t work. So I was, “I need help. I don’t know where to go from here.” No, it’s falling asleep, yeah, to come back to your initial question. Martin Reed: So you touched upon the fact that you obviously tried lots of things, which everyone listening to this episode is going to be able to identify with, right? Because we have a problem, we want to fix it so we try lots of different things. Before we started to work together, what kind of things had you tried that upon reflection didn’t prove to be that helpful? Juergen Kuhmann: So, initially, in the early phase before that super bad night, I used sometimes melatonin. At that time when we still traveled for business, you remember that time? Martin Reed: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Juergen Kuhmann: So I had a lot of also international travel and people said, “Oh, you can use melatonin. Once you get there, you want to catch an hour or two, it’ll help you fall asleep.” So I had a little bit of experience with that stuff. So I used it and it initially helped a little bit, but it started not helping after a while. And then at that time due to the stress, and that started before, already in 2019 with work related stress, I didn’t sleep super great so I drank too much coffee. Not much but it has to always the stronger coffee. Can’t just be a cup of coffee, it has to be one with an espresso shot in it. It’s not that I drink a whole pot of coffee. Juergen Kuhmann: I like coffee but not that much, but then I have coffee at 4:00 or 5:00 PM. And then I love beer, so, okay then, to reward myself for the work day, I have a beer or two at night. And then it was little bit my hobby, so you try this and the microbrews that has a lot of alcohol. Not a huge drinker. I drank maybe every other day a bottle or two or three or whatever. But when it was three, I thought about, “Are you sliding into some things?” I was already thinking about, “Three beers at night? That can’t be right.” It was already annoying. And then the whole day with the stress at work and then things that interest you around politics, and so there’s too much on you in terms of stress. Juergen Kuhmann: So I knew something was wrong and I tried to fix it. With not getting to sleep at night so I have to wake myself up with coffee, which doesn’t really work. And then reward yourself, sit down with a glass of beer or a two at night, and that certainly didn’t help. I knew I didn’t want sleeping pills. I heard bad things about those before so I never had one ever in my life, but I did try a few things like that. Martin Reed: And what about on the behavioral side of things? Did any of your sleep habits or sleep routines change? Did you find yourself doing things like maybe trying to nap during the day or going to bed earlier or staying in bed later in the day? Anything like that to try and catch or chase that sleep? Juergen Kuhmann: That’s a good question. Not so much the nap during the day. I don’t think that that came up. Frankly, I don’t remember me napping during the day. I did get out of bed and just said, “I might as well read something,” in the beginning. But the very beginning, I was just lying in bed, getting more worried and more worried and more worried about all kinds of stuff. And when COVID hit, everybody was worrying about, “How is this? What’s happening? Where’s this going?” How this changed our lives and how we go through the day. And my son was six at that time, just in school and that changed and I would have to have him home. There were so many changes. At that same point in time with my health problems. And I think my abuse of caffeine and alcohol at the same time, I just exploded my face, if you will. It’s just bad timing. Martin Reed: And how about, did you find that you were making any changes to your day? I mean, obviously when COVID happened, you’d already mentioned there was a lot of stuff you used to enjoy doing that you just couldn’t do anymore, which is out of your control. Was there anything that you found yourself doing to try and maybe compensate for difficult nights? Were you changing your days around in a bit to protect your sleep or to increase the likelihood of sleep happening the following night? Juergen Kuhmann: Frankly, I didn’t even know. Before I met you, and I had also a counselor, but what you told me is you can’t control sleep, and I didn’t. I was out of ideas, frankly, more and I didn’t really do anything else and just give up and say, “I need to ask someone for advice what’s happening here with me.” Because I knew at that time how it affected my days. One thing that I noticed is I couldn’t be me anymore. There was that loss of control caused me to lose myself. Said, “I’m the provider, I’m being the one who’s doing the work and providing and have my role in the family. My family relies on me.” And I felt I couldn’t fulfill that role anymore because of the lack of sleep. I couldn’t be productive anymore. And so that losing my previous self was that shock that happened. And I said, “How can I go on if I can’t fix it?” There was a bit of desperation as well. Martin Reed: So we worked together for eight weeks, but as you already touched upon, that was a long time ago. It was about a year and a half ago when we were working together. So since then, you’ve just been going it alone, flying solo, as I say. Looking back at your experience when we were working together and how you’ve been doing since then, what do you feel were the issues that made sleep difficult, that perpetuated that sleep disruption? And ultimately, what did you end up doing to address those things? Juergen Kuhmann: Sleep, it’s just learning from the counselor as well how to not control my thoughts, but how to look at them in a different way, which the thought that I couldn’t fall asleep scared me and that created anxiety and that kept me up. So just the learning that mechanism is so different from everything else I’ve ever actually experienced probably. I couldn’t think of anything else to let things be, they’re good like that and not be so hard on myself trying to be the good person that succeeds and provides. And giving up on that was probably a hard thing but the thing that turned it around, I would say. I think that’s the main learning out of it. And it was a process. You helped me through as how to look at sleep in general. Juergen Kuhmann: So in order to get sleep, you shouldn’t care about it, which is just the opposite, because all I was think… One thing I come back to, what did I do to get my mind off it as well is I just started doing work around the house and going back into the house. When it was worse in beginning of May 2020, it was a few weeks after that initial super bad night is I wouldn’t want to come home because I knew when I was home that’s where the anxiety was. When I was going to bedroom and see my bed, there was like, “Oh, now you have to go there again and you know how this is going to end.” And so all this anxiety was building up. Juergen Kuhmann: So I tried to do a lot of work outside, yard work and whatnot and just to get my mind off it, but inside me, I was always thinking about sleep. And to let go of that, and you taught me some good tricks, I have to say. You wouldn’t call them tricks, but these were things to have me rethink how I see sleep, which is tricking my engineering mind into thinking differently. That was the first time that I think in my long life I thought about things like that, to letting go of things is the key, to just let it happen. And some things just happen and you don’t have to be in the driver’s seat. I think that’s one of the biggest learnings actually for my life. Juergen Kuhmann: I think, and I told you before, I think I lead now a much healthier life because I learned how to let go and not have to fix. I read a saying just a few weeks says, “You don’t have to fix every problem every day, just fix one and let the other be.” But in our society, I guess it’s like producing things and solving problems is a value we carry, but it can be counterproductive as we’ve seen. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. I think really the whole struggle with insomnia, it does come down to control. Right? There’s a problem, we want to fix it, in this case it’ll be I’m spending too much time awake at night, I’m feeling anxious. So we put effort into sleep and we put effort into trying to fight those uncomfortable feelings like anxiety and worry. But the brain is generating all those difficult thoughts and feelings because it’s trying to protect us. So it’s trying to explore ways to help us out. So it’s telling us, “Look, there’s something going on here. We got to fix this.” But because those feelings don’t feel good, naturally we want to fight them or avoid them and that tells the brain that we’re ignoring it, we’re not listening. So what does the brain do? It thinks that there’s a very real threat here and you are not listening so it yells even louder and those thoughts and those feelings then become even more intense. And I just- Juergen Kuhmann: And you feel the threat, although it’s all in your head. Everything’s all mind games and your brain’s just doing, I guess what, like you said, what it’s programmed to do to identify a threat and point it out to us. But that’s counter productive to what our conscious mind wants. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. I mean, the brain can’t really tell the difference between a real physical threat like a bear on your bed during the night, or just a perceived threat, which is being awake at night. It can easily fire up all those same defense mechanisms; the racing heart, the sweats, the chills, whatever, that whole fight or flight response, it’s no different. But obviously it doesn’t feel good and we’re trying to push that away and it’s coming back even stronger and that leads to more anxiety and more worry and more sleep difficulties. Martin Reed: So in my experience, I see that people tend to struggle to put insomnia behind them for as long as we’re engaged in that completely understandable and default path of trying to avoid nighttime wakefulness or trying to fight or avoid all those difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions that come with insomnia. Because none of those things are within our control. We just cannot control what goes on in our minds and we cannot control sleep. And you said yourself- Juergen Kuhmann: Makes so much sense now. Martin Reed: Yeah.- Juergen Kuhmann: It’s like, “Wow, I never thought this would be the solution,” is to not really… But it is a way to behave and think differently, yeah. It’s just a different kind of solution. Martin Reed: Yeah. And it is very different because I think from birth, we are trained to try and avoid difficult feelings. Like, when we’re babies, as soon as we cry, someone picks us up, soothes us, “Don’t cry. Don’t cry.” How many times in our lives are we told to cheer up, to smile, to lighten up, to have a sense of humor? We’re just bombarded throughout our entire lives, told how we should be feeling. So whenever we don’t feel that way, we immediately think, “There’s something wrong here, we need to fix it.” Juergen Kuhmann: Yeah. This is pursuit of happiness all the time. We have to be happy today, and then tomorrow we wake up and we have to be happy tomorrow. And then when it isn’t this way for…. I mean, the main phase for me was three months and I wasn’t happy. There was not much happiness. You taught me to pull out some happiness by, I remember sitting on the porch and asking you questions, and out there and I said, “Why do you reward yourself for a bad night?” I said, “I can do that. I can find a reward for myself for not sleeping well.” So there’s these things that you then translated into actions I could take. Because if you, where I was at the point where I was helpless, I had no tools left. Juergen Kuhmann: And I think you find these tools. They’re not going to fix it from one day to another, but gives you that little bit of hope and good feeling and happiness. So when I had a bad night, I just got myself a couple of donuts. I went to Starbucks and had a great breakfast that my family didn’t have. So I rewarded myself with food, I guess. So, but no matter what it was, right? So getting out of the fear or the bad mood once a day and make that your new rule, that gave me a little bit of hope, I said, “Okay, I’m making progress.” Juergen Kuhmann: Or the thing that you said, maybe I’m jumping the gun here in terms of what you want to ask next, but just thinking about that it’s not about how it feels today, it’s how the long term development is. It’s not that you are not sleeping today, it’s about just essentially working on the anxiety, just getting that down, and then you solve the problem in an indirect way, not directly, which I try to do and failed, utterly failed. Martin Reed: I love the way you touched upon that pursuit of happiness, because I think for many of us, if not all of us, we consider true happiness to just be that absence of difficulty, the absence of suffering. So as long as we try and eliminate any causes of suffering or any difficult feelings and emotions in that pursuit of happiness, we’re going to get caught up in that struggle. Happy people can be happy without the absence of difficult thoughts, feelings, emotions, and experiences. It’s just the difference, I think, is for happy people, they focus on what they can do, what they can control. Martin Reed: So they’re more likely to be engaged in actions that they have control over that help them just continually move toward the life they want to live, even when there’s some difficult stuff going on at the same time. And I think that’s where the trap is. We think that in order to be happy, we’ve got to get rid of all the bad stuff. That’s not the case. We just need to keep doing the good stuff, maybe adding more of the good stuff and that in the end becomes our focus. And I think that’s the true secret to happiness. Juergen Kuhmann: Yeah. Because there will always be some suffering in our lives. You see ourselves or somebody else, some bad stuff happening, but we can create those happy moments for ourselves and then be good with it. Done this. You’ve got some good times today, or if you don’t have them today, tomorrow is another day. That constant pursuit of, to coming back to the sleep, right? “Oh, today it didn’t work again. I only slept three hours, four hours. I feel tired today. I don’t feel like myself today.” I learned to move on from there and find parts of happiness even though… And I said about losing myself in the beginning. Because I didn’t get to sleep I didn’t feel like myself. Regaining parts of that. After three months they opened the pool again so I could go swimming. That helps. Juergen Kuhmann: So regaining a little bit more of, okay, that’s your old identity, that’s your old self, that’s what you found happiness in and you could go back to doing some exercise. We found back, also back to spirituality, I have to say I always considered myself a Christian and a believer but I didn’t practice any of this. And maybe COVID helped that too. But I fought my way back to that and that became a new me, that there’s somebody else who is in control and let go. It’s the same, when I got back into going to church and listening to and reading some scripture, I said, “It talks about being patient in affliction.” I said, “That’s it. You have to be patient in affliction. You have to let go.” Juergen Kuhmann: And if you believe in God or not, it’s not about religion, it’s about you can’t control everything. There’s other things that you got to let go for a day and just work on it. And sometimes it’s not the solution. The way to make yourself better might not be the direct way you think about. It might be that path not a lot of people go with letting go and being fine with discomfort. When I first read that line, I said, “Yeah, how can you be fine with discomfort?” But I think that’s life. There’s discomfort everywhere, small and large, and we have to accept that we are not in control of that. we’re just one person. Martin Reed: And I think it’s important to not gloss over this discomfort, because when we’re living with insomnia, when we’re living with anxiety, it is difficult. We’re not trying to trick ourselves. We’re not trying to think positive or to distract ourselves from that or to convince ourselves that it’s okay. All we’re really trying to do is to recognize that, yeah, it is difficult, it is challenging. This doesn’t feel good, but we just need to focus on what we can control. And we can’t control sleep, and we can’t control those difficult thoughts and feelings, they are definitely unpleasant. But let’s look at what we can do, what we do have control over that helps us really just live a life that’s aligned with our values even when all this difficult stuff is still present. Martin Reed: So instead of trying to fight or avoid the anxiety, maybe we just make a little bit of space for it, we acknowledge it’s there so the brain knows that we are listening to it. We’re not trying to ignore what the brain is saying. We acknowledge what the brain is saying. We make a little bit of space for all those difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions. And then we shift our attention onto our actions. What can we do now that helps us move toward the kind of life we want to live even when all this stuff is going on in the background that doesn’t feel good? Juergen Kuhmann: So that comes in, and I’m a total layman about this, right? So I had this counselor who was doing this acceptance therapy, and what you just said, that sounded like basically which I know not much about, but he used that to foster this acceptance of difficult thoughts and then to move on from there. And then in the beginning, that the sleep thought I recalled, it said, which is, “Oh, I can’t fall asleep. It’s not working again today.” This thought, to accept it, to say, “Oh, hello, welcome. You are here. The sleep thought is back. I acknowledge it, it’s true. I, again, can’t fall asleep tonight but I’m moving… Thank you for letting me know. Now I’m moving on to…” And then they have this body based exercises, which you see yourself where you lie in bed and stuff like that. Juergen Kuhmann: And maybe the thought comes again, you say, “Oh, you’re back again. Hi. Right. Thank you very much. Again, thanks for letting me know,” and then you go. And I guess the brain at some point gives up on showing you that same thought over and over again because you don’t react to it. I guess that’s how I understood that but it helped me deal with those thoughts. I got so scared about it every time, which was the main issue in the beginning. And so that anxiety lessened over time, over the months. And so I was able to let go. Juergen Kuhmann: And it was hard, but you still did things. I still worked out, I still did my work, so it could be me although there was this pain inside. It was tough, not sugarcoating it, but it’s a tool. And that’s what I was looking for in the beginning, get a tool because I was out of tools, and that was a tool I could use and that gave me safety. I felt I had some level of control how to react to that situation I found myself and I felt about it, so a way to go about it. And then hearing from you is that people had success give you that hope, watch your podcast and see how other people were successful with that. I have to say, this is not to be underestimated. If people’s stories out there that made it through and I just hoped I would be one of those people that make it through, and I did, yeah. Martin Reed: I like the way you refer to these actions that you can engage in that you have control over as tools, because tools don’t necessarily solve a problem- Juergen Kuhmann: Very procedural. Martin Reed: Yes, I mean- Juergen Kuhmann: Programmer. So there has to be a program! Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. And that can be a real benefit. Tools, they’re not the solution itself but they help us get to that point. They help us on our journey. So I always say, if we implement something, if we implement a tool from the toolbox, if we have a great night of sleep, that’s not because the tool worked, that’s just because what you’ve been doing has proven to be helpful. And often it comes down to, we’re not trying quite so much that night to avoid nighttime wakefulness or to battle with all the stuff that’s going on in our mind. And similarly, if we have a difficult night, it’s not because the tools or the techniques or whatever you’ve done didn’t work, it’s just because on that night, maybe you were trying a little bit harder to avoid that nighttime wakefulness or you were battling a little bit more with everything going on in your mind. Juergen Kuhmann: That’s right. Martin Reed: It really is helpful to just focus on what we can control. And that’s where it can be an asset. You mentioned, “Oh, my engineer background. I just want this clear flow chart. If this happens, do this. Do this, do this, do this.” And that can actually end up being an advantage because we can be really tempted to engage in all different kinds of experiments. You know, “I’m going to try this, see if it works. Should I carry on doing that?” Martin Reed: If we just instead can just make a decision, stick to it, we just give ourselves a clear plan, so we might say, for example, “I’m not going to go to bed tonight before such and such a time, like before nine o’clock, because I know that I’m never sleepy before nine o’clock. I’m never falling asleep before nine o’clock. So I’m going to decide, number one, I will not go to bed before nine o’clock. Number two, no matter how the night goes, I’m going to get out of bed to start my day at,” choose the time, five o’clock, six o’clock, whatever feels good for you, seven o’clock, doesn’t matter. But you’ve just made that decision, you’re going to stick with it. One less thing to be thinking about. Juergen Kuhmann: And there’s that promise then. Once you have a bad night and you get up, for me from the beginning was 5:30. I had 11:30 to 5:30. 11:30 to 5:00 or something. I got up at 5:00 and I said, “I had a bad night.” But then you said, “This will create sleep pressure and you should have a better experience the next night. If the next night doesn’t work out either in terms of getting a little bit more sleep, at some point you will sleep.” So that also gave me hope to say, “Okay, I go that path. At some point, I will make a step forward.” So it’s always this little bit of piece of happiness I can get following this tool. You don’t want to use a tool that said, “Oh, it’s probably never going to work.” But you said, “Okay, there’s the sleep pressure so at some point your brain will make you sleep no matter what.” So that was great learning as well. Martin Reed: Yeah. And that’s the great thing about allotting an appropriate amount of time for sleep, because our temptation is to spend lots and lots of time in bed to try and chase sleep, to give sleep a good opportunity to happen, but that often just leads her more wakefulness during the night and keeps us trapped in that struggle. Juergen Kuhmann: Yeah, I was afraid of it, yeah. So reducing that time certainly helped, yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. And it also just helps remind us that we can still get sleepy. We can experience that intense sleepiness and it reminds us that no matter how difficult things are, sleep will always happen in the end. We will not remain awake indefinitely. We’ve never lost that ability to sleep. Juergen Kuhmann: It was hard sometimes at nine o’clock watching TV on the couch, I will be so sleepy. I said, “Oh, I can sleep on that couch, no problem. I fall asleep right now,” I wouldn’t have had any problem doing that, but I had to wait until 11:30. That was tough, staying awake. And then by the time 11:00 comes around, that anxiety comes up and, boom, I’m awake. But over time, it helped regulate it, definitely. It gave you, what do you call it? I forgot. What’s the English word? It gave you a route to go on. You had, maybe this is what you should do. And that gave me some sense of security. Know what to do and I know it’s going to produce a good result at some point and trust you in that. Because I used to watch your podcast where other people said it worked for them and also your professional advice in that. Martin Reed: Yeah. And the other parts of the plan that sometimes could be quite comforting is you always have that option during the night, if being in bed just really feels awful, really unpleasant, you can always just change that and just do something that you… I mean, you’re awake anyway. Why not do something that just makes being awake more pleasant? That technique also, or that tool or whatever you want to call it, the strategy is helpful during the day, too. If the day is difficult, how about we do something that might make the day a bit more enjoyable? And often that comes back to what our own values are, just living a life or engaging activities that help us move toward the life we want to live. Martin Reed: If we can keep doing those things, we’re helping to create and maintain good conditions for sleep, but we’re also training the brain that it doesn’t need to fear being awake at night. There’s no real danger or threat there. And we’re proving that by spending less time in bed. So the brain’s like, “Oh wait, how can wakefulness be a danger if this guy’s spending less time in bed?” If we’re doing things to make being awake at night more pleasant rather than tossing and turning and fighting, and if we’re living the kind of life we want to live during the day, even after difficult nights, the brain eventually learns that, “There’s no real threat here.” Martin Reed: And the real magic happens when we can drop that battle with our brains, you know? So the brain knows, “Oh, this person’s taking this seriously. They’re listening to what I’m saying. But also, on reflection, I’m seeing that being awake at night isn’t a threat.” And so it just starts to get quieter on quieter on quieter until we don’t really even notice it anymore. I think that’s where everyone who’s made this transformation, that’s really what they reflect on the process was. Juergen Kuhmann: Yeah. And in the beginning, I didn’t know that the brain is there and your conscious mind. I didn’t know you had to convince your… I’m using improper terms, probably. You’ve talking about “the brain had to learn”, I didn’t know they were separate things. I think, but there’s this brain that works on its own terms telling you to be anxious then you’re anxious. You feel it and you went, “Why am I anxious?” But I am. I can feel that that feeling is not very pleasant. And I mean, the turning point was when I go to bed, I say, “I don’t have to sleep if I don’t. If I’m not sleeping, I’m not sleeping.” Juergen Kuhmann: I say, “I don’t have to sleep. Maybe I just watch shows my wife doesn’t want to watch, but yeah, I can now because I’m not sleeping.” So there’s this positive, there’s an opportunity of doing something valuable to yourself, for yourself and I don’t care about sleep anymore. That’s where I am and I’m getting between, last week I had five and a half hours once, but I know why I had five and a half hours, because it was a lot of things going on right now with us. And so I know why I had only five and half hours. Two days later I sleep eight because I know that stress is over. But I don’t care anymore about it. And when you’re in it, that’s all you care about, is sleep. Juergen Kuhmann: The worst day was, it was 11:30 and I already was worried about sleep. How crazy is that? That’s the state you are in. And so starting not caring about sleep is easy to say when you’re out of it because at some point you usually I usually get 6:00 to 7:00, 7:15 or something like that. So I still know how long I sleep but I really don’t care about it. Martin Reed: I think that’s the key difference. We are always going to have some difficult nights. Just as we touched upon before, the real secret to happiness isn’t the elimination of everything that’s difficult in our lives. So we’re always going to have some difficult nights of sleep from time to time, what’s different is our reaction to it, how we interpret the meaning of that difficult night. And anyone that’s listened to a few of these podcast episodes will probably recognize that common trait is, “Yeah, I still have some difficult nights from time to time, but I really don’t care about them that much. They don’t consume my days. I don’t start to worry about what the next night will bring.” It’s just our relationship with those difficult nights and whatever the brain might want to generate in response is completely… Juergen Kuhmann: I’m actually at that stage right now, when I have a bad night I know I’m going to groggy in the morning, but come 10:00, 11:00 I’m woken up and I’m just going about my day. So it doesn’t when you’re in it, then you always think about it most of the time and it affects your day. And when I have a bad night now, I typically know why it was shorter and I don’t care anymore, because I know sleep pressure builds, like you told me. So the next night or night after that, I’m just going to be sleeping longer again. So yeah, that not making it the middle, the center of your life is I think the most important outcome. Not putting at the center of life and being able to just accept when there’s a shorter night. And typically I can tell why too. Martin Reed: So moving on, when we were no longer working together, you told me that you ended up developing tinnitus. And understandably that generated some concern where your brain was looking out for you again. So there were some anxious thoughts and feelings there. And before we recorded this episode, you said that insomnia and tinnitus tend to share that similar trait. They both tend to survive and thrive when we remain anxious about them. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I mean, I’m no tinnitus expert but I’m sure that some people listening might recognize that. So I’d love to hear some thoughts. Juergen Kuhmann: I had experience with tinnitus before, almost 20 years ago, loud concert and stress and so on so I developed this ring in the ear. And back then I went through a therapy called tinnitus retraining. So anyone who has tinnitus should look at that. Juergen Kuhmann: And so I got tinnitus I back, and it was the time where I was just getting better with getting off insomnia. I was sleeping better, then comes tinnitus. Martin, I was devastated. Because as you said, they share traits of anxiety. And when you get tinnitus, the thing that you develop is anxiety about how it affects your life, your day, you as a person, you start to think about you can’t do certain things anymore because you have that noise in your head and nobody else can see it. It’s like with insomnia, you can’t see it by looking at a person that they have it. And then come the sleep worries again. Because when you have tinnitus, you have that noise in your head, it affects your sleep, right? How can you sleep? Juergen Kuhmann: First of all, you develop anxiety, and then there’s a noise there. And I knew that this TRT, this retraining therapy helped me before, but I also knew it was a long-term process. It took me a year last time to get through it where it wouldn’t affect me anymore and it would be much quieter. But at the time when that onset happened, these feelings came up again, “When am I going to be sleeping again?” But what I found going through is, while still getting out of insomnia, I mean we had stopped working together, so I was good on insomnia, but then the sleeplessness came back because of tinnitus. I thought, “Okay, now these two problems are going to combine forces and I’m never going to sleep again.” I remember being totally devastated about it. Juergen Kuhmann: What I found out is you can only be anxious about one thing at a time. So me being anxious about tinnitus kept out the anxiety of insomnia, the deep down trying to control sleep because I knew how to not control sleep, to actually let it go. I still knew that, it was just very present in my mind. And I knew how to treat it, TRT. So with TRT, I know how to treat tinnitus with sound therapy and they have some CBT stuff as well. So it’s a little bit similar treatment like insomnia. Juergen Kuhmann: And so after those first initial weeks, I had my tool set for tinnitus, I had my tool set for insomnia, which was really more tools than maybe I wanted, but the focus was on the retraining therapy for tinnitus, not so much on insomnia, but doing the one helped the other. So essentially, I never experienced insomnia to that same degree when I had tinnitus, to the same degree before I had it again. So that was the lucky outcome. But in sense of therapy, it shares quite a few traits. What the therapy does to reduce the goal is not to reduce the sound in your head, the ringing in your head, it’s to reduce anxiety. So I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s what insomnia… Insomnia was not how you slept, but how anxious you were, and there’s always the next day.” And with tinnitus, they have ups and downs. It’s louder, it’s quieter, but over time you make progress. Juergen Kuhmann: I still have those ups and downs with tinnitus as well. And those, then I can think back about what I learned, also with insomnia to say, “Okay, today is not the best day, but I remember two days ago I had a fantastic day.” And I can take that as, “Okay, you have the tools, you keep going where you’re going.” So it’s tough being faced with that, but the tools are very similar. Also, the acceptance of thoughts, of negative thoughts and accepting those. And I said before, being patient with yourself and being kind to yourself in affliction, those things are learned when I went through insomnia. Juergen Kuhmann: As I said before, I think I live a much healthier life now. Also, not so much drinking anymore. Not because I think I… That essentially, I’m German so I still like beer, but it’s not such a big deal anymore and I don’t want to use it more as a crutch. I still drink coffee, just not so crazy anymore. So, and I’m more compassionate with myself. So putting that pressure on myself to do the right thing and to be the productive person, I stepped away from that and… look, other people go through lives in much more relaxed way than I did and they’re happy too. So I can now see other people living another life than I did trying to be this high performer in the corporate world, there’re other things to life, and I learned to see that and accept that. Martin Reed: I think it really can be this journey of self discovery, right? Juergen Kuhmann: Yeah. Martin Reed: I mean, it’s hard to see any advantage or any silver lining to insomnia and anxiety when you’re really caught up in the middle of it all. But when you get to that point where you’re able to emerge from it, it can be this sensation or this sense that, “I’ve learned something about myself here.” Like you just touched upon, “I learned that I can maybe be kinder to myself when I’m going through difficulties.” And a lot of people also tell me that they’re now more in touch with their values, the things that are important to them that they have control over. These are things we never lose. We never lose control of our actions. We can always do things, no matter how small that help us move toward the life we want to live. And when people emerge from this journey, it can be this reflection that we’ve learned a lot about ourselves, and now we might even be able to live our lives in a more enriching way than we would ever have had insomnia, had anxiety never played a role or an influence in our lives. Juergen Kuhmann: Yeah. It’s a tough way to learn to lead a better life. It’s a tough way to learn it, but I guess it was time for me to learn it. Because I knew I wasn’t heading down in a good direction. There was too much heady things on me. I tried to fix it with things I knew weren’t good for me. As a technical person, I live in reality and all this. If I don’t see it’s not real, “Oh, a lot of things we don’t see that are real.” And I certainly see that now. And I touched on spirituality before. I always was spiritual, but there are many things between heaven that we have no control over and we don’t know how those work. Juergen Kuhmann: And as you said, there’s the brain of yours and there’s your conscious actions, and that those are two separate on your mind. I don’t know if you’re using the right terms, but there’s a separation of the brain that’s on automatic. It does what it does, how it’s programmed, and it can go into a rabbit hole that makes you feel worse in how you consciously lead your life. And you can’t reprogram that brain just by flipping a switch, it has to learn anew as a program, new piece of code. So my brain had to learn a new piece of code. But it takes some time and you have to be compassionate with yourself. So, a lot of learning that came out of it. Now looking back, it’s always easy. When you’re in it, you have to be more tactical and you need those tools. But, no, I wouldn’t say insomnia was a great experience, but going, learning how to deal with difficulty like that, that’s the positive thing I take away from it. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Juergen, I really appreciate the time that you’ve given up to come on. I think that people are going to get a lot of value out of what we’ve discussed. The way you’ve described things is just really easy to identify with everything that you’ve described. But I do have one last question for you before you go, if that’s okay. And it’s this: if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and feels as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Juergen Kuhmann: I think first of all is, listen to other people’s story, listen to mine and listen to all the other ones, Martin, that you put out, because also with tinnitus, a lot of people don’t know there’s a way to reduce it and more or less get rid of it, if you will. Because like with insomnia sleep problems, you don’t think about them anymore. You can get to that point and then it’s not a problem anymore in your life because you dealt with it. So I think the first step to give you hope that you can get better, you can get better back to your own self is to listening to other people’s stories. Everybody had a little bit different journey and that’s what I really appreciated, is you putting out stories of other insomnia sufferers. It said how did they go through that journey. Juergen Kuhmann: Because when you’re first faced with it, there’s no door you can go through. And suddenly you hear other people talk about it, “Well, that’s the door I went through and that’s the path I went and that’s the door this person went through.” And at some point, there’s some people you said, “Okay, they come from a different place,” but you find other people said, “Oh yeah, he or she, that’s like me.” And giving you that success story is very important as a first step to say, “There is a way for you to go as well.” And it might be a way no other one went before, but there is one for you as well. So that’s the one thing I would say, listen to all these stories, the good stories that are out there. People have gone through that before. And be compassionate with yourself. It will take the time it’ll take but you’ll get better, but step by step. So we have to be patient with ourselves. Martin Reed: Well, that’s great. I think that’s a really positive note to end on. So thank you again, Juergen, for coming up to the podcast and sharing your journey with us. Juergen Kuhmann: Yeah. Thanks, Martin, for inviting me. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Kristina had a very stressful job. One night, her husband woke her suddenly after experiencing a really bad nightmare. This event seemed to trigger the release of a lot of anxiety that had been building for some time and Kristina was unable to fall back to sleep. Unfortunately, sleep proved to be difficult on subsequent nights, too — and this created even more worry and anxiety. At first, Kristina found that she could fall asleep but would wake in the middle of the night with a racing mind and find it hard to fall back to sleep. This then shifted into difficulty falling asleep — and this change created even more anxiety and sleep disruption. Kristina’s mind constantly worried about sleep. Even if she was doing something she really enjoyed, her mind would interrupt her with thoughts like, “What if I don’t sleep tonight?”. She wondered if this would be her entire life from now on. She worried that if her sleep didn’t improve, she wouldn’t be able to live the kind of life she wanted to live. After trying lots of things that didn’t seem to help, Kristina started to do things that are known to starve insomnia of the oxygen it needs to survive. Instead of chasing sleep by going to bed earlier and staying in bed later, she started going to bed later at night — when she felt truly sleepy enough for sleep, rather than fatigued. She got out of bed by the same time each morning — no matter what. Whenever being awake at night didn’t feel good, she did something more enjoyable instead. Perhaps most importantly, though, Kristina decided to work on shifting her focus back to the present moment and what was in her control. She engaged in things each day that helped her continue to move toward the kind of life she wanted to live, independently of sleep and even in the presence of difficult thoughts and feelings. Sleep is no longer a problem for Kristina. There is no more mystery and there is no more struggle with wakefulness and difficult thoughts and feelings. Kristina’s experience proves that although we can get stuck, we are never broken. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Kristina. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Kristina B: Hi, Martin. No problem. So glad to be here. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on. Let’s just get started right at the beginning. Can you tell us when your issues with sleep first began, and what you feel might have triggered those issues with sleep? Kristina B: Absolutely. So, at the time it was specifically around Christmas of 2019. I had a couple different reasons that filtered all into one overlying issue, but a couple things were I had a very high stressful job that was very goal oriented and deadline driven, very micromanaged. So, I always had that kind of stress hanging over my head. Then that filtered into one night in particular. My husband had this really bad nightmare that he normally doesn’t have and woke me up from a dead sleep and kind of startled me. And I think from there, it triggered all of this anxiety that was building up for months and months and months. And I wasn’t able to get back to sleep, particularly that night. And then it kind of filtered in, in this drabble of days then leading into weeks that I did not sleep, probably going maybe four days in a row. That very first insomnia kind of problem started for me. So, it wasn’t one underlying thing. I think it was many different things, but what caused it to come out was that particular time that my husband had his nightmare. Martin Reed: Yeah. Wow. And so when you were experiencing that disruption, it sounds like it started by your sleep was interrupted during the night when your husband woke up, maybe. Was that what the sleep disruption was like for the following nights, the following weeks and months? Was it difficulty of falling back to sleep when waking? Or is it more just the whole process of falling asleep from the start of the night, or maybe both? Kristina B: So, that’s a great point. So at first for me it was the… I could fall asleep and then I would wake up in the middle of the night, kind of have these racing thoughts about what I needed to do, or checklist, and day to day things. So then, I kind of had this shift where it then turned into not being able to fall asleep at all, that I would just lay there for hours and hours. So, it was kind of twofold. I began with just waking up and then not being able to fall back to sleep. And then it turned into just not being able to fall asleep at all. Martin Reed: Yeah. It’s obvious that that’s going to make the nights more difficult, but I like to think insomnia isn’t just about nighttime symptoms. It comes with all these daytime symptoms too. Were you finding any knock-on effects on your days? How was insomnia affecting your days? Kristina B: Absolutely. So, with the insomnia, this was… The first instance was around that Christmas time and so going into the new year, I had then found and got a new job. I was really stressed with making sure that I was going to be able to have enough sleep. So I could function at this job. Then I was going to have enough sleep so I could enjoy my daily things. If there was something that I was having to do either at work or after work, or in my personal life, I always had then… was very anxious if I wasn’t able to sleep. So I think that the anxiety came hand in hand with that and those sleep related worries, definitely, I think was the biggest struggle that I had because that I think was the biggest effect from the insomnia. Kristina B: It was always, “What if I don’t sleep tonight?” Even if I was doing something that I was completely enjoying, it was always in the back of my head. And I always would think, “What if I don’t sleep tonight? If I don’t get enough sleep right now, I’m not going to be able to enjoy X, Y, and Z.” This isn’t going away. This is something that I need to find the root cause of it right now.” Kristina B: And so it led to a lot of sleep related anxiety or sleep related worry. That was the biggest thing. Physically I was okay. I did feel like I was always in that hyper arousal stage or feeling where it just… elevated heart rate and just kind of jittery, a lot of it. That’s kind of where it led to. Martin Reed: Yeah. So before we started working together, what kind of things did you try to do to kind of fix the sleep, to try and fix the anxiety? Looking back now you can reflect on… They probably had good intentions. They came from a good place, but maybe they weren’t proving to be helpful. Kristina B: I feel like I did everything that I could try to do or find that was online. I think the biggest thing when any individual is facing this, the first thing you do is just start Google searching everything. So I think the easier part was what I didn’t do, but I tried… First was melatonin, magnesium, obviously probably more than the recommended dosage, weighted blankets, essential oils, lavender, oil lotion, candles, aromatherapy, THC, either ingesting that, CBD oil. I mean, anything that was a, “Hey, this will help make you sleep more restful,” from a sound machine. Or anything that was… Blackout curtains, I pretty much did it all or tried it, we’ll say. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think you made a great point that our default whenever we have an issue, normally we just go online, search Google, find all these tips and tricks and techniques because we want to fix the problem. But unfortunately all these kind of tips, tricks and techniques that tend to be right at the top of all the search results, pages of stuff, that’s generally not that helpful for people with chronic insomnia. And it can be a bit… That can make things even more difficult because when we see… I would try this, try this, try this, then when we try those things and they don’t work, then we can become even more worried that maybe there’s something unique. We’ve got this unique strain of insomnia that’s not responding well to all of these things that we’re told should be helpful. Kristina B: Yes, that is so true. With that being said with Google searching and you’re doing your own thing, and I know personally for me, I have general anxiety disorder. So things get very heightened where sometimes my thoughts do get away from me, and I did happen to go to the doctors. I was always a good sleeper. I never had anything like this happen to me before. I loved sleep and naps and everything. So I went to the doctors and explained to them what was going on. And they had kind of chalked it up to stress and here was a variation of sleeping pills, or benzos, or antidepressants that I could take. And so I even had one doctor tell me that I should just lather myself in the lavender lotion and count my blessings twice. That’ll help me fall asleep. Martin Reed: Wow. Kristina B: Yeah, it was quite… So, it definitely, you try to find the… You think that you’re, like you had said, this is a different kind of insomnia that you’re experiencing and you just… Once you find that perfect little or think you’ll find that perfect little formula to help you combat it, you’ll be completely fine, but that’s all of these little things that you think you’re doing right are actually pulling you more from the actual root cause of what’s going on. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. And it can just add more… This veil of mystery to insomnia, when really there isn’t any mystery to insomnia. From person to person it’s really similar. The characteristics are almost identical from person to person. Our individual circumstances can be different. And as a person, we’re absolutely unique, but the insomnia, no, not really. There’s not really much mystery there. And as you know, when we were working together, we actually… Insomnia is just so predictable and so generic that we actually have a model that describes the development of insomnia, where we have some of us are just more predisposed to some sleep disruption. Maybe we’re we have a more sensitive arousal system. We’re more prone to anxiety or stress or depression. So, we’re already a little bit closer to that bar of sleep disruption than maybe other people are, but we’re not experiencing sleep disruption yet. We might go for years, decades, even maybe our whole lives without much sustained sleep disruption. Martin Reed: But then we get the second P which is the precipitating event. That’s just whatever triggers the insomnia. And some of us, we don’t really know. There’s no obvious cause, but many of us can actually pin this down to a specific event that happened, whether it’s our husband’s waking up during the night with night terrors, or a nightmare, or new job moving house, going on vacation. Just any change that leads to some sleep disruption. Martin Reed: Now we’ve got some so insomnia going on, probably more than nine times out 10, once that trigger is no longer relevant or we’ve adjusted to it. We fall back below that bar sleep comes back. But when it doesn’t, it’s almost always down to these perpetuating factors. And these are just all the behaviors that we implement to try and improve our sleep, to fix our sleep and all the thought processes that go on often related to putting pressure on ourselves to sleep, to put effort into sleep, or to try and push away all those difficult thoughts and feelings that like to come along for the ride when we have insomnia. These are the things that keep that insomnia alive. Martin Reed: And so when we can recognize that, that, “Oh yeah, this does sound like my insomnia,” we can perhaps also recognize it if we can change some behaviors, change our relationship with those thought processes. In other words, address all those perpetuating factors. We might then be able to make progress towards getting our sleep back on track for the long term, rather than these things that might just be quick fixes. This is like a real long term solution. Kristina B: Yes, yes, absolutely. And that was a big thing for me was always the… Setting it up so I wasn’t going to just… If I was having a difficult time falling asleep, or if I had woken up and wasn’t able to, to use everything and implement it. Because before the course, I would just sit or, excuse me, lay there, and just keep my eyes shut thinking that that was going to help me or that if you’re laying there still and to keep your eyes shut, that’s going to help you just automatically fall asleep, even if you’re you’re anxious and thinking about everything else and you toss and turn and then you look over at your partner and there’s sound asleep. And you’re like, “Okay, what’s wrong with me? This is just something that’s happening to me.” And then you kind of lead into this downward spiral before you take those tools to kind of take a step back. Martin Reed: Yeah. I always think it’s important to emphasize that all these things that we do to try and fix the problem, they’re completely understandable why we do them. They make sense. “I want to get more sleep, so I’m going to spend more time in bed.” It’s completely logical why we would do these things. But when we’re kind of caught up in that moment, in that struggle, sometimes it can be harder to see that there might be a different way of doing things that, for example, instead of spending more time in bed, “I wonder what would happen if we spend less time in bed?” If most of the time we’re spending in bed is awake anyway, what if we just spend less time in bed to…An amount of time that more closely reflects how much sleep at the current time we’re getting. Martin Reed: So, we’re not going to be taking sleep away from ourselves. But what we can do is take so much of that prolonged nighttime wakefulness away from ourselves while also building more sleep drive, because we’re going to be spending less time in bed. We typically will be going to bed later or getting out of bed earlier or maybe both. So we’re spending more time awake, more time for the body to get truly sleepy enough for sleep. Kristina B: Yes. The sleepy enough was a big thing for me and staying awake and because when you go through your whole life thinking, “Okay, bedtime is bedtime.” And even if I wasn’t tired, I would just crawl into bed and I would try to compensate for the hours that I wasn’t getting. So rather than going to bed at 10, I would climb in at eight and then that just led to more tossing and turning and frustration before getting out of bed and realizing that when you do acknowledge this, what we know as the sleep window and allowing yourself to feel what it’s like to be tired again after this prolonged period of just, well for me, anxiousness and sleep related worry, and just not being tired at all, it definitely helps you realize that this is what it’s like to feel tired again, rather than just trying to force your body to do something that it’s not completely ready for. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s easy for people without sleep issues to confuse fatigue with sleepiness as well, and fatigue, along with like anxiety and all those difficult thoughts and emotions, are probably the number one symptom associated with insomnia. But ironically sleepiness, not so much, because when we have a really intense sense of sleepiness, like we are really finding it hard to actually stay awake, we’re really likely to fall asleep. Martin Reed: But what can happen is when we are caught up in that struggle with chasing sleep like you described, or we’re using the clock to tell us when it’s time to go to bed, rather than that sense of sleepiness, we can feel… “I’m fatigued, I’m exhausted, I’m run down, I’ve got brain fog. I can’t think straight. This must be time to go to bed.” But fatigue doesn’t really lead to sleep, whereas sleepiness does lead to sleep. So, it’s really easy to get those two sensations confused and muddled. And that’s, I think, one reason why allotting a little bit less time for sleep, spending less time in bed can be really helpful because one of those early wins… I like to think of them as like little wins, a little stepping towards recovery, is you suddenly start to recognize that difference again between sleepiness and fatigue. And that can be really powerful. Just bringing that experience back. Kristina B: It really is powerful because… And then another thing that I would do is always watch the clock. And so knowing that it was not the clock watching. The clock obviously is not anything that doesn’t do any good for you except to perpetuate the problem. But it was definitely something that I felt different once I realized, “Hey, this is sleepiness.” Kristina B: And there were nights where, when I really started to notice things were working that I wasn’t even making it to my sleep window because I was so tired and actual sleepiness that I was falling asleep on the couch. So there was a few times that I would say, “All right, let’s try to go to bed and see what happens. And if I feel like I’m getting a little not tired again, I’ll get out.” And it definitely helped me realize that sleepiness is what’s going to lead to sleep. And, soon enough I was sleeping. So it was really good thing to recognize again. Martin Reed: Yeah, it can be really powerful. I think it’s almost ironic, isn’t it? Because our initial, your struggle is we feel like we just can’t sleep. And then if we start implementing the sleep window technique, we can then find, “I’m struggling to stay awake now.” It’s just a complete transformation that can really just give you that motivation to keep moving forward and stick with these kind of behavioral changes and maybe even implement some new ones too. Kristina B: Yes. Yes, absolutely. That was a big one for me was the sleep window. And that really was something that I obviously needed because before I didn’t know how to absolutely tackle insomnia. So, that was something that really helped me back on track with sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, I’m just curious when, when we were working together and you learned about the sleep window and we were talking about how about we spend less time in bed, go to bed late or get up earlier, just allotting less time for sleep, what were your first thoughts on that? I mean, did it seem logical to you or, or was it kind of a leap of faith? What were your thoughts when you learned about this? Kristina B: Yes. At first thought, I was trying to go in as open-minded as possible, knowing that I was doing this course, and this is going to help. But at first, I definitely had those thoughts of, “I don’t understand why I would stay awake even more.” And then I would always think like, “Okay, well I’m always getting up to go to work at five or six in the morning,” and I have to go to bed later than what I thought would be a restful bedtime. At first I was like, “Oh, okay. This seems like I’m not going to get any sleep if I’m sleeping between the start time and when I wake up.” But I mean, at the beginning of it, I really wasn’t sleeping at all. So I learned that this is what I need; the step I need to take to get to better sleep. Kristina B: But at first it was a little bit of a challenge for me. I think the challenge came with doing things that would help me relax into that sleepiness. So it was the not watching the clock, and to learn to relax again and to use either tools that you had recommended or just to kind of relax in my own way. And that was really helpful too. Because I would just… If I didn’t have this sleep window, I would just sit there and watch the clock. And even when I did implement it, it was still like, “Okay, just because it’s whatever time it was, doesn’t mean that I go to bed, even if I’m not tired, just because this certain time is starting. If I was still wide awake doing those certain techniques or tools, or just relaxation things, if I wasn’t tired, it helped me to realize, “Don’t go to bed, because this is just going to keep me awake. I’m going to have to get out of bed soon and we’re just going to start the whole cycle over again.” Kristina B: So it definitely I think, it reinforced that if you’re doing this, then don’t go to bed just because you have this time. It was a big clock watching kind of mind thing for me. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think that’s worth emphasizing as well because we do see some of the advice that’s online is, “Go to bed at the same time. Get out of bed at the same time.” And I think the latter point, getting out of bed around the same time each day, I think that can be really, really helpful because it helps strengthen the body clock, and it makes sure that we are just going to be spending enough time awake during the day to help build that sleepiness come nighttime. But I don’t necessarily think it’s always helpful to go to bed exactly the same time every night. I like to think of giving ourselves like an earliest possible bedtime. Martin Reed: So, let’s say we want to start spending six hours in bed instead of 10 hours in bed, we might say, “Okay, that’s midnight to 6:00 AM.” So, we think then instead of midnight, “I have to go to bed,” we can just have midnight. “I’m not going to check the clock anymore from that point onwards. And I’m just going to go to bed whenever I feel sleepy enough for sleep. But then regardless of how the night goes, I’ll get out of bed at 6:00 AM. Martin Reed: Just give that I for a couple of weeks. Many people find it helpful. But yeah, I think we can combine this bedtime with only going to bed when we feel a strong sense of sleepiness by just thinking of the start or the start of that bedtime as earliest possible bedtime rather than the time I must go to bed. Kristina B: Yes. And I like what you had said about waking up at a certain time every day. That was I think one of the other challenges that I had to overcome because I realized that when I was going through all of the height of this insomnia, I was definitely trying to… If it was on the weekend, I would, if I did fall asleep, I would potentially sleep in later. I was finding myself not wanting to, or having the urge to want to call out of work because I wanted to turn off the alarm and go back to bed. So, that was really important too. Just telling myself that, “Hey, no matter what time that you fall asleep and go to bed, you’re going to…” Kristina B: And I try to use it as more of a looking forward tool. “I’m going to wake up at say six o’clock and I’m going to complete whatever I have to do before work or take some time for myself.” So that was something that had helped me to with just the sleep window and having that set time to wake up too. Because that was also… I was noticing that, “Hey, okay. I’m not sleeping or I didn’t sleep last night, so automatically I’m not going to go meet my friend or family member because I’m going to feel so exhausted. I’m not going to have a good time because I’m going to be thinking about sleeping and everything.” So that was something that reinforced the positive sleep for me, was wake up at the same time, no matter what happens, even if it’s only an hour of sleep that you think you got just get up. So it was hard if I was asleep, because there were nights that there was no sleep, but it definitely helped with the days I got a little sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. Did you have ever have those nights where it feels like you just fell asleep, like half an hour before your alarm was due to go off? Kristina B: Oh many, yes. Many times. I think the biggest thing was I would finally get relaxed and use a lot of the techniques or tools or just, I guess, pass out from pure exhaustion and then my alarm would go off. But that was another thing too that I would start. I noticed that I would be thinking like, “Hey, I can use this day and go to work and do everything that I need to do. Workout or go grocery shopping.” And by the end of the day, my sleep drive from last night’s non-existent sleep or whatever sleep that I didn’t get is going to help with this night’s sleep, rather than looking at it as, “Oh my God, I’m not going to sleep tonight,” or, “I can’t stop thinking about what happens if I don’t sleep. And I feel like this is going to go on forever.” Kristina B: So that was something too that really kind of helped with that, was building that sleep drive. So, even if it was a half an hour before my alarm, it was definitely a… Started to turn as the weeks went on. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think that’s one of the hardest things to do, I think is getting out of bed at that consistent out-of-bed time, especially on those nights where you got very little sleep or it feels like you just fell asleep just before the alarm is due to go off. Yeah. But, it can feel great at the time to just switch off that alarm and just kind of catch up on that sleep. But then all we are doing is we are just perpetually playing catch up. We’re never kind of setting ourselves up for good sleep on subsequent nights. We’re just always caught in that struggle of just playing catch up, just treading water. So sometimes we might have to sacrifice a little bit of that extra sleep we might have got in the short term to get those longer term results that most of us are, upon reflection, actually looking for. Kristina B: Absolutely. Yes. Martin Reed: One thing I did want to touch upon was the fact that when you started to implement this sleep know by allotting less time for sleep and when you started getting out of bed by the same time each day, it wasn’t like this miracle cure. It wasn’t like the very next day or two days later, everything was fixed and sleep was this magical experience for you. It took time, right, for you to implement these techniques consistently before you noticed some consistent results and started to get a little bit more confidence in the techniques? Is that fair to say? Kristina B: Yes, absolutely. It was not, I think we go, at least for myself, I went into this thinking that it wasn’t going to be that miracle. Snap-my-finger cure, we’ll say, that I think a lot of us set out to find with perpetual or chronic insomnia. So, it definitely took the time and the willpower to know that this is what I have to do to get my sleep back on track. And with that too, knowing that it wasn’t going to take or be an instant fix, it really helps your mind make room for more positive thoughts rather than always having just the self destruction that I think a lot of people experience in just listening to previous podcasts that you’ve done with individuals, that we think it is very, very specific to our personalities or whatever that we’re dealing with. But it definitely, if you allow yourself the time and just keep going, even if you’re going into it and you’re in your fourth week or the last week, and you’re having a really hard time or had a bad night, it helps you know that it’s okay to have a bad night, and sleep is going to come back. It’s all beyond your control, and the less control that we have with it, the better it’s going to be for us in the long run. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think the only thing that we can do to make sleep happen is to just be awake for long enough. That’s the only thing that we actually have control over is trying to stay awake. Any other kind of aspect of sleep, we have no control over. And it’s when we do try and control it, that we tend to get most caught up in that struggle.And this is where that sleep window could be helpful because we’re not trying to make sleep happen. We’re not trying to generate sleep. We’re just trying to build some sleep drive. We’re kind of reducing that opportunity that’s available for long periods of nighttime wakefulness. We just kind of setting the stage for sleep and maybe just undoing all those behaviors that we might have implemented to try and fix things that haven’t proven to be too helpful. Martin Reed: But yeah, I think it is really helpful to just recognize that we can’t control sleep, but what we can always control fortunately, are our actions and our behaviors. It might seem impossible or really difficult to do that, but we can. We can always do things even when our mind is telling us we can’t do them. Everyone listening to this, now we can just say to ourselves, “I cannot lift up my right hand,” or, “I do not want to lift up my right hand,” and then try and lift up your right hand. You can still do it. Martin Reed: You mentioned that you first learned about that sleep window and your mind was generating all those thoughts. “What if this doesn’t work? I don’t think this is going to work. This doesn’t sound logical.” But you are still able to do it. We don’t have to push all those thoughts away or try and challenge them or get tangled up in them. We just have to recognize that the mind’s generating these thoughts because it wants to look out for us, it wants to protect us, but we get to choose what to do next. And we can always make that choice. We always have control over those actions. Kristina B: Yes, that is I think so applicable to this and a lot of other aspects in life. But just knowing that, like you had said, your thoughts are just going to generate and they’re automatic and your reaction to them is the biggest thing of what we can control. Kristina B: I know for myself, I think the biggest thing with going through the insomnia was the sleep related worry all the time. I had these rapid fire thoughts of everything that I had mentioned before of what if I don’t sleep tonight or ever, or what if this is my entire life from here on out. And that would be the biggest struggle for me. So, definitely with learning, they’re just a thought, let it hang out and kind of carry on with your day. That was so life changing too. Kristina B: And it really, it applies to everybody. It’s not specific to a certain person, and everybody can do it, which is a great thing. Our mind, it’s so powerful, and if we start to give it what it’s telling us that we think we need, so worry, or stress related things, then it’s going to react to that and just kind of generate more stress thoughts. But if we just kind of let them hang out and carry on with our day or whatever we’re doing, it can take away some of that anxiety that surrounds it. Martin Reed: Yeah, definitely. I like to think of it as just making some space for them, because the mind’s always going to generate them. I think our default response just as human beings is, “This thought or this emotion doesn’t feel good, so I want to shut it down. I want to push it away, get rid of it.” But then it’s a bit like a beach ball where you’re pushing a beach ball under the water. It just pushes back harder the more you try and push it away. So if we can maybe change practice, it takes practice. It’s a new way of thinking or a new way of developing a relationship so to speak with our thoughts instead of just by default, trying to push them away. Martin Reed: What if we can just make a little bit of space for them? Acknowledge them that they’re here, identify them, maybe even name them. Here’s that anxiety again, make a bit of space for it, and then kind of redirect our focus and attention onto where we are, what we’re doing, the present moment. And actions and behaviors we can do that might be more constructive and more beneficial than trying to control our thoughts, trying to control our brains. So we might say, “Okay, I’m going to make sure I get out of bed at 6:00 AM today,” or whatever, whenever your alarm’s going off. Or, “I’m going to make sure that I call up my friend today,” or, “That I meet up with a friend today,” or, “I’m going to go for a walk today. I’m going to do something that’s kind of aligned with my values that helps me live the kind of life I want to live, even though my brain is in the background, going nonstop, telling me I can’t do this. I’m feeling anxious. ‘You should rest.'” Martin Reed: We still get to choose how to respond to that. And I think it does. It’s a new skill, right? I think it takes a lot of practice because I think all of our brains are hardwired to first of all generate difficult thoughts, but then also to try and get rid of them and stop them from happening. And that’s where we can kind of really get caught up in the struggle. Kristina B: Yes. I really, really valued what you had just said. That is just basically encompassing of everything with what you kind of think about and how you deal with things, so that was great. And I really like that beach ball analogy. It’s very valid because you’re not really doing anything by trying to think you’re pushing the thoughts away. Kind of just, oops, comes right back up. Martin Reed: Yeah. And you know, and what happens to a beach ball if we just let it float next to us if we’re in the ocean or a swimming pool? Eventually it just kind of drifts off all by itself. We don’t have to try and push it away. It will just come around. It will come and it will go if we just can make a little bit of space for it to do that. Kristina B: Right. Yes. So true. Very, very true. Martin Reed: Yeah. You know, I know that there was another technique, another change that you had made when you were lying in bed and finding that sleep just wasn’t happening. And it was just getting out of bed as an alternative to just staying in bed. And I remember when we were working on this, you mentioned that this is something you’d tried before, but maybe in a slightly different way. So we kind of explored maybe different ways of implementing this technique. Do you remember the differences you remember when we were working through that? What those differences were? And do you have any idea why you may have found a slightly different way of implementing this technique helpful? Kristina B: Yes. Before I had signed up for your course, if I couldn’t sleep, I would get out of bed. And with that kind of we’ll say my trial, getting out of bed, before I signed up for your course, I would get out of bed if I couldn’t sleep. And then I was also thinking, “Okay, I’ll give it a half an hour and then I’ll go back to bed.” Kristina B: But the biggest thing was that I was just watching the clock for half an hour and thinking that, “Okay, it’s a half an hour. I’m going to just go back to bed and then I’ll be able to fall asleep.” But it really didn’t do anything even. So, at first I would get out of bed and just go sit on the couch and either watch TV or read a book or do something. But it wasn’t a relaxation technique at all. It wasn’t anything that I really wanted to do. My mind was just ultra focused on the clock. It was always watching the clock and what time it was. “Okay, it’s been 30 minutes. I should go and try this again.” Kristina B: I was so anxious to try to get myself to sleep, it was just always… I was always watching the clock. So, when you and I were working together, it was more so of get out of bed if you can’t sleep; do something that’s actually relaxing; and don’t go back to bed until you feel that sleepiness. That was the biggest difference. And to not obviously watch the clock was that… Time is irrelevant in that sense and just use your body cues. If you think it’s been a half an hour or an hour or however long it takes, then that’s how long it’s going to take. Kristina B: The 30 minutes was just kind of a guideline. If you’re starting to feel those sleepy cues, then I would approach bed, but if not, then I would stay awake. So that was definitely I think the biggest thing, was to get out of if I wasn’t tired, but then to not watch the clock until I felt that I was ready to go back to bed doing something that was relaxing me too. It wasn’t stimulating me too much. Kristina B: I would go and read a book or I would go and just kind of stretch out or just sit in my living room and be mindful or breathe or meditate rather than thinking, “Well, I’m awake. I can just go and watch TV or do something that I have to catch up on or look on my phone,” which is never a good thing. So, that was I think the biggest difference. Martin Reed: Yes. I think, I think many people who have done a lot of research on it, some have probably come across this technique, which is usually referred to as stimulus control. And often it is suggested if you’re in bed awake for like, it’s always different, it’s like 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes, then you should get out of bed for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and then return back to bed and just keep repeating the process. Martin Reed: I think where this can be most challenging is we can easily lose sight of what the goal or what the purpose of this technique is. And really the purpose of the technique is just to prevent us from reinforcing the idea that the bed is a really unpleasant place to be. If we think that that is our goal, rather than trying to make sleep happen, getting out of bed during the night logically isn’t going to make sleep happen. And it’s not to punish ourselves for being awake or for finding it hard to fall asleep. All we’re trying to do is to make sure that when we’re awake, it’s not too unpleasant to be awake and that we are not reinforcing this association between the bed and unpleasant wakefulness. Martin Reed: So, with that in mind, I don’t don’t think we have to really pay any attention to the time. Like you said, when we’re just looking at the clock or trying to mentally, chunks of time, we’re just going to be more awake, just doing, being engaged in that process. Instead, how about we just use how we feel? If we’re awake in bed, as long as it feels good to be in bed, then we are not forming an unconstructive relationship with our bed because we’re in bed and it feels good to be in bed. I don’t think we need to do anything. But, if being in bed starts to feel unpleasant and it just feels like conditions aren’t right for sleep, then how about we just get out of bed or even just sit up in bed maybe, but just do something that helps make being awake a little bit more pleasant. Martin Reed: It really just gives us an alternative to just staying in bed and just struggling throughout the entire night, which is never, never really pleasant. Kristina B: No, it’s not. And getting out of bed, I really think is with all of the other tools, it is the biggest, we’ll say rule that I think is the most beneficial, because if you think that, “Hey, that’s not going to work for me,” you’re just going to lay there and toss and turn and think about… Your mind’s going to go and it’s not effective and like you had said, you reinforce that bad relationship with your bed, rather than getting out and saying… That was one thing that I had remembered too, once I started to really not pay attention to the clock and say, “Oh, you know, I’m going to go to bed when I’m tired, because my bed is a place of rest.” It’s not my adversary which I think I was treating it like that. And that really helped to form that relationship again with my bed. That’s where I get the most restful sleep and that’s where we’re going to sleep. And I really had to… It’s weird to say, but rebuild your relationship with your bed. I think when you go through insomnia you want to blame something and obviously you just subconsciously just blame your bed because that’s where you’re not sleeping and not resting and recharging. So, that’s the biggest thing that you think is the problem. I’m glad that we touched on that. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it was about around like four weeks, six weeks of us working together. I remember you said that you kind of shifted your attention more towards things that you can do, things you have control over, like things that, actions that kind of add enrichment to your life, that add some enjoyment to your life, help you live the kind of life that you want to live. And you started to say… You started to experience the… You were finding that you were a little bit more able to be present, not always obsessing about the what-ifs I don’t sleep. You started to get that sense back that you do have a natural ability to sleep. Your relationship with your bed, like you touched upon, started to change. What was it that led to these changes? Do you think it was just purely those behavioral changes, or was there a change in your relationship with those thoughts and those emotions as well? Or, was it both? I’m just curious to hear your thoughts and how you got to that point. Kristina B: That’s a great question. I think it was a little twofold. If I had a day where I was adding enrichment and I basically, I think accepted what was going on and accepted that I don’t have control on any of this. And I don’t really have control on anything in my life, but, and nobody does except for nothing. But, I think the biggest thing was letting go and accepting, which really to me, was that, “Hey, I’m going to have these rough nights no matter how great of a sleeper I was or how great of a sleeper I think I should be. I’m going to have bad nights, even if I have five great nights. One night’s going to pop up and it might be really bad, but I’m still going to enjoy my life and enjoy those things that I can bring happiness and joy to myself.” Kristina B: That definitely had kind of brought my focus back to being present. I did use a little bit of meditation too, and that kind of helped for mindfulness, but it was mostly adding things that I wanted to do that I knew, regardless of how tired or sluggish or anxious I felt, I still enjoyed these things before, and I’m good to enjoy these things again, no matter what, and sleep is not going to take that away from me anymore. Kristina B: I think it was giving myself the confidence and power back with that. And knowing that, like I had said with the control thing, and kind of that I think was a really big breakthrough with the course, was just noticing that this is how it is right now and it doesn’t have to be bad. It’s kind of just the viewpoint on it, but definitely helped me for sure. And that’s when I really started to notice the sleepiness and everything was really starting to come back to me and really starting to strengthen the feelings of, “I can sleep and sleep didn’t leave me. There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s no… I don’t have any ailment that’s causing this.” It’s just a matter of your mind at that point. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think everything that you’ve said is completely logical and I think there are going to be people listening to this that can recognize, “Well, yeah, sure. If I can get to that point where I can just let go of all the effort of trying to control sleep, or if I can just allow myself to feel all these difficult thoughts and emotions, then yeah, sure, I would probably be able to sleep fine. I realized that it’s the anxiety that is causing or perpetuating the sleep disruption.” But how do I get to that point where I allow that to happen or I accept it? What would you say to people having those thoughts right now? Kristina B: That’s a great question. I, I think it comes down to, and I know for myself and I know everybody’s different, but I think that I’m just kind of thinking back to when I was going through all of this. I think the biggest thing for me was it has to be when the time is right for you. And there’s nobody that can tell you when that is. And you think that it’s going to be a certain time and you think that just because you’re doing all of these things that it’s going to … Miraculously your mind’s just going to say, “All right, this is you’re fixed. You don’t need to do this anymore. We’re going to be perfect now or sleep great.” Kristina B: But I think it’s just when you’re ready. And I don’t really know if there’s a solid answer as to how to get to that, except to just not give up on yourself and not stop. It’s definitely a commitment. And like we had touched on before, the mind is a really powerful thing. This is a whole process. It’s not going to be an overnight thing, but if you keep going and not give up on yourself and just invest the time… I mean, we do so many things and between work and personal lives, it’s just I think realizing too that you have to… At least for me, it was I had to take care of myself too, which I think sometimes we can put on the back burner. I know. Kristina B: I probably got a little away from the question, but I don’t think it’s a tailored suit question. It’s kind of go at your own pace and when you are ready and when you keep doing these things, it’s going to fall into place. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s great. I think that somewhere, a place where we can often get tripped up is this idea of acceptance. Accepting difficult thoughts, accepting difficult nights. That can be really hard to get our heads around, because it almost sounds a little patronizing at first, when someone tells you, “Oh, if you just accept that you had a difficult night or you just accept that you’re stressed, then everything will be fine.” We can equate acceptance with giving up, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s just about accepting what we can’t control. And what we can’t control is things like sleep itself and all the stuff that our mind wants to tell us and generate and all those thoughts and feelings, those emotions. It’s just about accepting what we cannot control. Martin Reed: I love that you said commit, because it’s then about committing to doing things that we can control that might help create better conditions for sleep. That might help just move us toward that kind of life that we want for ourselves, rather than our mind says something, we immediately react and end up kind of getting hooked and moving away from the kind of life we want to live. Martin Reed: And like you said, we don’t have to do huge changes immediately. We can just take those baby steps. We can just do small, subtle changes as and when we feel ready to do so. It’s almost like a version like exposure therapy, where we just try and do something that might make us feel uncomfortable. Let’s start off really small and then as we start to recognize that we can get through that challenge. We can face that challenge. Maybe then it’s time to add a little bit more or to try something else, try something new and just go from there. There is no one size fits all and we don’t need to pressure ourselves to do everything right away. Kristina B: Right. And that’s the biggest thing. I think there’s a lot of power with that too. And I think what you said of definitely don’t compare yourself to what everybody else is going through, or even people and myself right now doing this podcast, that everybody is at a different place. And everybody goes through things differently and reacts to them differently. It’s just do what’s the best for you essentially. But yes, that’s such a great point. Martin Reed: Yeah. We worked together for eight weeks, but that was a long time ago. It was like over a year ago when we actually stopped working together. Looking back on that kind of timeline, where do you feel you were at? How many weeks, or how many months till you got to this point where you felt just like more confident about sleep? It was like less of a… Sleep wasn’t up on a pedestal in your life anymore, and you felt more confident. It was taking less of your attention and you felt it was kind of behind you now rather than on your shoulder or sitting, waiting for your own future nights. Kristina B: Yes. I would say it was probably a solid month after completing everything, a month or two. I really had regained confidence with sleeping after the course was completed. And I really had noticed everything that we had talked about previously with reactions and enrichment and putting those anxious thoughts into the back of your head. But I do think that I gained the most confidence with sleep probably a month or two after I was complete with everything. Because at that point it just kind of became, okay, we’re still going to… If I’m having these thoughts, or have a bad night sleep, I have this whole tool chest of things that I can use that I know how to do now. And that really built the confidence with sleep is back and sleep is now my beautiful, awesome friend. Kristina B: I still do have a tendency to have a bad night’s sleep every now and then. I think it’s very natural and we have a lot going on in our lives and it’s easy for something to sneak up or be excited about. There’s a loud noise or you just can’t fall asleep kind of thing. But I definitely think that on average, it was probably a month or two after the course was complete. Martin Reed: Yeah. I love asking that question especially more recently because everyone wants to know how long is it going to take and everyone’s different. So, some people get results really quickly, some people longer. And just like you said, we can’t compare ourselves to others. We are all unique individuals. And also, because we can’t control sleep, when we try and hold ourselves to a timeline, we can then find that can be just like completely counterproductive, because we are trying to achieve results in a certain amount of time, but we can’t directly get those results. It is kind of like if we set ourselves the goal of, “I want to have a job promotion. I want to get this job promotion in like six months time,” there are definitely things we can do to try and increase our chances. We can say later at work, we can ask the boss if they need any extra projects being done. But at the end of the day, we can’t get that job promotion. We can just implement behaviors that might make that more likely to happen The timeline itself or reaching the goal that we’ve set, we can’t actually directly control. We can just control the steps along the way. Martin Reed: I think it’s really helpful that you said, “I worked with Martin for eight weeks, but it wasn’t until even a month or two months after we even stopped working together,” that you felt that this is just not so much of an issue for you anymore. That you felt really confident in the results you were getting. And like you touched upon, because they’re all skills based, behavior based, they’re with you for the rest of your life. So, you’re going to have some difficult nights like everyone does. If they stick around, you know exactly what to do in response to avoid perpetuating those temporary nights of sleep disruption as well. Kristina B: Yes, absolutely. And yet I still, still sometimes have I call them my junk thoughts, but I have, “Oh, what if I can’t sleep tonight because I’m doing something?” Or, I have this thought or had a bad day. I honestly just shrug it off now. Well, I know that I can’t control sleep. I can’t, and tell myself everything else. So it does go hand in hand. Martin Reed: Yeah. How would you describe… You probably don’t think about sleep quite as much as you did like a year ago, but if you just think about an average night, what’s an average night like for you these days? Kristina B: Well, I mean, I go to bed when I get tired. I mean, I would say, and I should preface this by saying I have a seventh month old baby. So sometimes I go to bed as soon as she goes to bed. But on average, and I will sometimes have to wake up in the middle of the night, but on average I climb into bed depending on the time is whenever I get tired and I’ve been able to just fall asleep with no problem. Kristina B: If sometimes my husband and I will watch a show or something in bed, because I feel obviously confident to do that again, and I’ll just pass out. I don’t stay up very long. So I don’t really have too many disruptions unless my daughter is awake. But if I do find myself waking up either to go to the bathroom, or I just have a thought come up and I can’t seem to let it go, I still will use the tools of getting out of bed or just relaxation, breathing, and visualization, those kind of things. They really do help. Kristina B: I’m sleeping restful with the sleep I do get, but I’m definitely sleeping restful. I wake up when, obviously still at the same time, because I have to go to work, but I’m not anxious feeling. I don’t feel that jittery kind of anxiety. So, I definitely have my sleep back. Martin Reed: Yeah. Wow. That’s amazing. And what about your day? What are the days like now? Has there been any change into the quality of your days or how you reflect on that life satisfaction, so to speak? Kristina B: I still to add try to add as many enriching things as I can into a day outside of work and routine and everything like that. But I mean, on average, I have really great days. I mean, obviously everybody has a bad day here and there, but I absolutely think that in a weird way, it kind of made me take a step back with everything, having insomnia. And I know we talked about, you had mentioned, it’s not one thing. It kind of is all of these perpetuating things and it makes insomnia either happen or prolong it. Kristina B: But I definitely think that I had to go through it to teach me something about letting go and control, and I feel like I bring that into different aspects of my life now. So, I’ve learned a thing or two. And that’s just me personally. I’ve learned about the control and, and anxious thoughts and, letting things go a little bit more than I previously had. On average, I feel just like a better person. I don’t know if that sounds cheesy, but it definitely helped me kind of refocus a little bit with things. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think that’s great, Kristina. I really appreciate you coming on and just sharing your story because I think a lot of people are going to really identify with a lot of what you’re saying. I think these stories can just be so powerful because almost everything we read about insomnia is really kind of like doom and gloom, because it’s not nice. It is a struggle, it’s difficult, it’s a challenge. But if we can recognize our story or our experience in that of other people, and we can hear in their own words what it was like for them, how it was affecting them, the changes they made, their struggle with those changes and how they kind of came out the other side of it, it can really kind of give us that reassurance that our insomnia maybe isn’t as unique as we felt, that maybe if there was hope that that person had a transformation, maybe there’s hope for me too. And just give us the motivation and the confidence to maybe explore making some changes ourselves. I think it can just be really powerful. Martin Reed: But, having said all that, I realize I haven’t asked you this last question, which I ask every single guest, so I want to make sure that I ask you too, so you don’t feel left out. And it’s this: If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help, they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Kristina B: I think the first thing would be to not give up on yourself. When you’re going through this and you feel everything, every emotion, and you feel isolated and alone, because nobody that you know has gone through this, don’t give up. It’s only temporary. It’s not a permanent thing. It’s something that you can absolutely find a solution for, and I highly recommend that you do use Martin’s course and implement every thing. Kristina B: I hope that you find sleep again, and I think that you will, but the biggest thing is to not think that this is the way life is going to be. This is not the end of your sleep. Your sleep will return, and know that it’s going to be okay. And I think we need to hear that more, but know that it’s going to be okay, and know that you’re not alone, and it will get better, for sure. It will get better. Martin Reed: Great. I think that’s a positive note to end on, so thank you again for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast and sharing your story of transformation, Kristina. Kristina B: Absolutely. Thanks for having me and good luck to all the listeners out there. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Deeandra always slept well but a stressful period in her life led to 48 hours of no sleep whatsoever and this generated a lot of anxiety. Deeandra started to panic and thought that she had lost the ability to sleep. Doctors gave her different medications that didn’t always seem to be helpful and came with their own set of side effects. For three years, Deeandra put her life on hold while she engaged in a long list of rituals and experiments in an attempt to improve her sleep. Gradually, Deeandra moved away from trying to control sleep and avoid nighttime wakefulness. She started to go to bed only when sleepy enough for sleep. She decided to live her life regardless of how she slept at night. She started to do things she’d withdrawn from — she no longer canceled plans, she started to exercise again. Little by little she reclaimed her life from insomnia — and her sleep began to improve. Today, Deeandra averages around six to seven hours of sleep. She still has difficult nights from time to time but they no longer have such an effect on her life. In Deeandra’s own words, “life is about the time we spend awake, not the time that we sleep”. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Okay, Deeandra. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today. Deeandra: Thank you, Martin. Thank you for having me. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on let’s just start right at the beginning as always. If you could just let us know when your sleep problems first began and what you think caused your initial issues with sleep. Deeandra: Well, it started in 2018. I was going through a stressful time in my life, lots of stress, lots of problems at work, and switching houses, and stuff like that. I was going through a tremendous amount of stress, but I actually used to be a really great sleeper even through stress and anxiety. I mean, strangely, I never really struggled that much with sleep before. But in 2018, I don’t know, maybe it was lots of stuff going on, and I basically just started struggling with sleep. All of a sudden I couldn’t sleep. Before I would have a sleepless night every now and then, and I wouldn’t really think much of it. It would happen and the next night I would be okay. I would go to sleep and I would recover from that. Deeandra: The first night, after this lots of stress, I struggled for sleep that one sleepless night. I said, “Okay, a sleepless night. It happens every once in a while. It’s nothing in particular. And the next night I will sleep.” And the next night happened and still, I didn’t sleep. And then I thought, “Oh my God, this has never happened before. Why I’m still not sleeping. I mean, this is the second night I’m not sleeping. This is new. I mean, this is not something I have experienced before. There must be something wrong with me.” I mean, who doesn’t sleep for 48 hours? Of course, I didn’t really go 48 hours straight without sleeping. Probably I slept something, but in my mind I wasn’t sleeping for even one minute. Deeandra: And the anxiety went through the roof right after that second night. And I really started panicking that maybe something is wrong with me. I mean, my brain stopped working. I have a neurological problem or something. Because after these 48 hours of sleepless nights I was really having lots of anxiety, and I just couldn’t understand how could I not recover from that. So, I went to the doctors and I said, “I’m struggling to sleep here. I don’t know what’s wrong. I mean, it’s all of a sudden. I know I am having this trouble sleeping.” Deeandra: They gave me a medication, a tranquilizer so I can recover from that. And they told me, “You know what? You are going through some stress, maybe just take it for two weeks to get your sleep back on track so you can recover and get some sleep. And then you’ll see that your sleep will magically recover on its own. It’s a cycle so it will get back on track without even trying.” I believed them. I said, “Okay, maybe something is wrong with my brain or something.” I don’t know. Deeandra: I took the medication. And of course, after I stopped my medication, I started having the sleepless nights again. And this was really strange. I mean, I said, “Why is my sleep not getting back on track? Something is wrong here. I mean, am I just going crazy? Am I losing my mind here? Am I going through…” I mean, I was really panicking. It was really consuming even my mind. Every day I was always thinking about it. So, I went to see a psychiatrist and I explained what I was going through. And they said, “Okay, maybe you’re depressed. Maybe you have a lack of serotonin in your brain. That’s why you’re not sleeping.” Deeandra: I said, “Of course I’m depressed. I mean, I’m not sleeping.” I mean, anybody would be a little bit depressed I believe after not sleeping for two days. So I said, “Okay, of course, my mood is not that great because I’m really tired and I don’t feel well, but I don’t think I’m…” I mean, there was nothing else. I mean, it was only the sleep at that point, even because the national stressors was actually resolved after… I mean, I was only struggling with sleep at that point. I mean, the initial stressors was really not an issue anymore. I was just struggling with sleep for no reason. And they told me, “Maybe, yeah, you need to fix your serotonin and get back on… Again, get back on track.” Deeandra: Nobody explained, “Maybe you need to address something else.” They just said, “Take this medication. Take the antidepressant, and it will get better.” Of course, again, I believed the doctor, and I took the antidepressant. And it was a sedative antidepressant, and I took it for six months believing that this was the cure for me. I mean, it was going to help me to fix my serotonin again, because I believe that something is broken. I don’t know if it’s normal for someone just to… I really believe that I lost this magical ability to sleep. I mean, I believe that everybody had this button that made them all… Deeandra: Yeah, that magical ability to make them sleep. And I lost it. I mean, I really thought I lost this ability. And it came in my mind that, I will never have this ability again. I mean, I will always rely on this medication which actually gave me really bad side effects. I was really tired, and it didn’t even work at times. I was really taking it for no reason at one point because it didn’t really work. Every night, I mean, it would work for a couple of nights, and then it wouldn’t work. And then, it really didn’t make sense after a while to take it. So I said, I don’t feel comfortable continuing to take it. So I basically tried to wind off the medication and this was also a struggle. You just can’t get off these medications without a long period of deteriorating the medication, and just making sure that you’re taking a lower dose every week or something. Deeandra: And it was a really, really difficult time in my life because I needed to weigh the dose and just being careful that I… Because I believe that if I just stopped taking it, I will not sleep. I mean, I need to do this carefully so I can recover from this. And no one actually mentioned to me… They actually talked to me about going to therapy, but they mentioned CBT in general for anxiety. And I went to this therapist and we talked about anxiety and unresolved issues, trauma, lots of stuff, but we never really addressed the insomnia itself. I mean, they always told me, “You have…” I mean, I know I’m an anxious person, and I know that I dwell on things more than others probably. Deeandra: And that’s why I said, “We need to work on anxiety then if this is causing my insomnia.” But no one really said something about, you know, explaining sleep to me or anything else. I mean, we would always work on the anxiety part of it, and it did help to lower the anxiety and just being less anxious and knowing all the mindfulness techniques to get through the day. But I think I was… I mean, I would just find myself terrified that my sleep would really always be this way. I mean, I started asking myself, “Am I going to be at…” I was 29 at that point, and I turned 30 and I said, “No, I’m 30 years old. And I can’t believe that I’m going through this at 30.” Deeandra: I thought that I would be doing lots of different things. I mean, I really wanted to go and study again. I wanted to go back to school. So, this was put on hold now because I was struggling so much with sleep. Basically, sleep was becoming my life for like… Yeah. I mean, it became everything I thought about from the morning, from waking up until the evening time. It was really the only thing I thought about, and it’s really consumed my day, and it was a really… This is how it started. This is how the insomnia began. Deeandra: But then, yeah, I tried to go to my therapist, and I believed her when she said, “Insomnia is probably going go away when you’re less anxious, and maybe after six months of antidepressant your serotonin levels are now higher. So now you’re going to sleep.” But I was really afraid, I said, “This is my life now. I’m just going to be this person that have to rely on sleeping pills, or maybe have to rely on medications for the rest of their life.” Yeah. So, this was it. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s really interesting when people describe their background before chronic insomnia struck. Some people tell me that, “I’ve always struggled with sleep throughout my life, but then this time around, for some reason, the sleep disruption didn’t disappear.” And then other people like yourself tell me, “I’d never had a problem with sleep. And then this sleep disruption come around and it just would not go away.” And I think in a way that can generate even more worry and anxiety because- Deeandra: Exactly, yeah. Martin Reed: … it just adds so much more mystery to the situation. Right? Deeandra: Absolutely. Martin Reed: And then we can start to worry that something has changed. We’ve lost something, some ability or some chemical. Deeandra: Exactly. I mean, I even used to say in the past that sleep was my superpower. At some point, it used to say to my husband, even I struggled with anxiety, but I would say… I would sleep it off. I mean, I would go to sleep and then just… I used to be a really great sleeper that sleep was actually my favorite time of the day, going to bed and just relaxing and going to sleep and just waking up. And so, when this happened, I really believed them when they said, “Something is wrong with your brain.” Some chemical, hormonal issues, something is wrong. There can’t be a switch and just like that, I can sleep. Yeah. Martin Reed: Well, you touched upon the fact that, because this was just consuming your life, and it was basically making you put your life on hold. Right? You said you had these big plans to go back to school and start studying again so you put them on hold. Were there any other changes that you made to how you live your life or how you went about your days in response to this insomnia, either as a way to try and protect yourself from the effects of sleep disruption or to try and generate better conditions for sleep? What kind of changes had you made to how you were living your life? Deeandra: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, insomnia really affected my life when it happened, because I would wake up, and I would just say, “I have to survive today.” So, I will just do the minimum. I will just stay on the couch or something. I will not exercise, so I can survive today, and get through the day. And it’s really sad. But I had… My son would ask me to do stuff for them, and I would say, “No, I can’t. I mean, I’m really tired. I have to lay down or something.” Even, I would cancel plans with my family. Deeandra: I mean, I really enjoyed exercising, so I would really not go to the gym anymore because I said, “I can’t exercise if I didn’t sleep last night. I just can’t do that.” I mean, it would really consume my energy even more. I can’t even get through the day, so how can I do some physical activity without having any energy. I mean, insomnia was really like the… It had a huge grip on my life, basically. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. Absolutely. And this is just where I think it can be so helpful to peel away the mystery of insomnia, because from person to person, the way insomnia works, it’s almost identical. Some of us, we actually have this model that regular listeners of this podcast will be familiar with, called the 3P Model that we use to describe the development of chronic insomnia. And the first P is just predisposing factors. And you kind of touched upon, “I feel like maybe I’m a little bit more of an anxious person than other people.” So already, maybe, we’re a little bit more susceptible to some temporary sleep disruption. Martin Reed: And so then we have the second P, which is the precipitating factor. This is just whatever the trigger for a round of sleep disruption was. So for example, with what you were describing, there was a stressful time in your life. You were moving house, lots of different things going on. So we will probably expect people to experience some sleep disruption at that time. So now, we’re in the sleep disruption stage of insomnia. Nine times out of 10, probably more often than that, once that initial trigger is no longer relevant or we’ve adapted to it, our sleep gets right back on track or by itself. Martin Reed: But if it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, as you know and everyone listening to this will know, that’s when the real worry starts, and the real mystery seems to be generated around insomnia. But again, there is no mystery. When the insomnia sticks around, it’s down to that third P in the model, which are the perpetuating factors. And these are all the things that we completely understandably do in response to the sleep disruption to try and fix our sleep or improve our sleep or help to manage all the side effects that come along within insomnia, the kind of backfire on us and actually perpetuating insomnia and make it harder for our body to just naturally get sleep back on track. Martin Reed: We might do things like… Just use your own examples, because we feel so fatigued we’re going to just want to be less active. We’re going to want to spend more time being sedentary, being on the couch. We might withdraw from doing things that are important to us or that add enrichment to our lives. You mentioned for yourself exercise and going to the gym was important to you. Spending quality time with your child was important to you. And these were all things that changed in response, and other common things that we might do are, going to bed earlier, or staying in bed later just spending more time in bed in general, to try and catch up on sleep, or to make sleep happen. All that kind of ongoing research, and again, all of these things are completely understandable why we would do them because we are going through difficulty. We want to improve the situation and fix the situation. Martin Reed: But sleep is one of these things that doesn’t respond well to effort. And it’s when we start to do all these things in response that actually end up perpetuating the sleep disruption. And I think it can be so helpful to recognize this because it strips insomnia of the mystery. We don’t have to start… Well, if we can identify our own struggle in that model, then perhaps we don’t have to worry quite so much that there’s something uniquely wrong. Our brain is now missing a chemical, or there’s some hormonal imbalance, or we’ve lost that magical sleep switch because we never lose that ability to sleep. It’s just that our understandable response to that sleep disruption is usually what provides insomnia with the oxygen it needs to survive for the longer term. Deeandra: Yeah. I completely agree. And it was actually an obsession. I started to obsess about sleep in a way that I… Like I said before, my life now revolved about sleep, basically. I would think about sleep all day long. Am I sleeping enough? Am I not sleeping enough? Did I get enough sleep? How can I cope? I always heard about the eight hours. The eight hours, you should get eight hours, otherwise, you are not healthy enough. Your brain will be… You’re not functioning. I used to read… I go online. I read all these articles about insomnia and maybe the effects on health. I also struggle with health and anxiety. So, this would give me even more anxiety, because I think I’m causing myself some… I might get sick or something if I don’t sleep those eight hours. Deeandra: And actually, when I discovered your podcast, I was walking one day outside, and I heard someone on your podcast. They said something that really… I actually started crying because it really touched me because they said something like, “Life is about the time we spend awake, not the time that we sleep.” So, I mean, life is the time we spend awake. This is what matters. Sleep is just… It doesn’t matter. Life is about the moments that we spend awake. I shouldn’t obsess about sleep so much. And actually, yeah, I mean I said, “I completely agree because I wasn’t living anymore, basically.” All I only cared about was sleep, actually. I didn’t care about my life. I just wanted to sleep. This was my main goal in life, basically for a while. Martin Reed: Yeah. Absolutely. And that’s completely understandable, right, because our brain, its prime directive is to look out for us. And so, it’s always going to want to put pressure on us to fix any problems that it perceives are going on in our lives. It’s going to tell us, “Do that research. Try this. Try that. Do this. Do that.” And it can be really easy to just get caught up in all of those things our brain is telling us. But with a bit of practice, sometimes we can listen to all that stuff the brain is telling us, but then take a step back from it, and then decide consciously how we want to respond to everything our brain is telling us. We don’t necessarily have to do everything our mind tells us we still have that control. Even though sometimes it can feel like we don’t, there’s always control we have over our actions and starting to do some things when we’re awake that are important to us. And that bring us a sense of enrichment even when our mind is saying, “No, you can’t do that you must rest.” It can be really helpful. Martin Reed: And these don’t have to be huge things. If exercise is really important to you, it doesn’t mean you have to start doing 20 miles on the treadmill. It might just be reading about exercise or reading about fitness. Just any small actions you can take to just help you start moving back toward the kind of life you want to live, rather than responding immediately to everything your brain is telling us which usually ends up moving us away from the kind of life we want to live. Deeandra: Yeah. Martin Reed: And so, just to take a quick step back, you mentioned that when you were working through my course, you found it really helpful just to learn more about sleep and learn more about insomnia, and that knowledge helped you change your relationship with sleep. Can you remember any of the key insights that you learned that you found most helpful? I mean, you just touched upon that insight about life really is about what we do when we’re awake, as opposed to when we’re asleep. But was there anything in terms of just knowledge about sleep and insomnia that you found really helpful? Deeandra: Well, they always told me that I should go to sleep. When you go to the doctors, they give you this information, sleep hygiene and all this, you shouldn’t watch TV before bed, you shouldn’t work in bed, you should always go to bed at the same time, and wake up at the same time. And I would do that. Deeandra: I mean, what I actually learned from you, from when I started your course is that I was going to bed at the time that I wasn’t actually sleepy. I mean, there was this time that I said, “Okay, this is my bedtime, so I should go to bed at this time.” And I shouldn’t in any… I was really strict about it in a way that it was really actually affecting my life, honestly, because I couldn’t even go out to dinner with my husband because I had this bedtime. And it was a ridiculous bedtime because it was at 9:00, so it was really early. I had to be in bed by 9:00, and I had to be in bed by 9:00, and this was my bedtime. And I couldn’t even change it because he told me that I have to go to bed at that time. Deeandra: And I didn’t like… When I enrolled in your course, I learned that I should actually go to bed when I’m sleepy so I can prepare the perfect conditions for sleep. So, I started doing that, not going to bed when it was 9:00. I mean, waiting until I’m sleepy unless I’m sleepy. Instead of going to bed and just waiting for sleep to happen even if I’m not that sleepy, I would change that. I mean, I changed that. So, I would wait a little bit, not just at 9:00, maybe waiting till I get a little bit, you know, heavy eyes, doing something good for bed, or something else so I can feel more ready for bed. And that’s one of the things that I did, yeah. Martin Reed: We often see this advice, “Go to bed at the same time, get out of bed at the same time.” I think it’s close. I think that getting out of bed by the same time each day can be really helpful. It’s something I always encourage people to do because it gives the body clock, this strong, consistent morning anchor, so it can help regulate between sleep and wakefulness. But going to bed at the same time at night can be less helpful because a clock doesn’t know when we’re sleepy enough for sleep. What I think can be helpful is having an earliest possible bedtime, because like I touched upon earlier, a common behavior that can perpetuate sleep disruption is spending too much time in bed, or just generally allotting too much time for sleep. If we can give ourselves an earliest possible bedtime, that helps us avoid allotting too much time for sleep, spending too much time in bed, but it also helps change our mindset about it. Martin Reed: This isn’t the time you must go to bed. It’s just an earliest possible bedtime. So if that bedtime arrives and you don’t feel sleepy enough for sleep, then we just don’t go to bed until we do feel sleepy enough for sleep. And when we are feeling a strong sense of sleepiness, conditions are so much better for sleep to occur. And I don’t know if you recognize this in your own experience, but something I regularly hear from people is when I changed that, when I started to go to bed much later, I realized what sleepiness felt again because that sleepiness had been replaced by just ongoing fatigue, brain fog, exhaustion, feeling worn out, and it’s really easy to confuse that with sleepiness. So when we get that sense of sleepiness back, there’s a real struggle to actually stay awake, that in itself can just be such a powerful experience and a great reminder that we haven’t lost the ability to sleep. Deeandra: Yeah. I completely agree. And I actually really used to enjoy this night… I mean, before bed, I would watch a movie with my husband or something and just wind down or have a cup of tea or something. I used to love that, loved this bedtime routine. And after fixating so much on sleep, like a soldier, I was like at 9:00, I had to go to bed and just be under the covers. And I didn’t even give myself this… Even like the time that I really enjoyed actually, and I should give myself this enjoyable time by myself so I can do something enjoyable before bed that relaxes me. And I was fixating so much that for a long time, I didn’t even put my son to bed. Deeandra: I used to put him to bed every night, read him stories, and just put him to bed. I didn’t even do that because my bedtime had to be at 9:00. I had to be under the covers. I mean, it really affected even this quality time I had with my son before going to bed. He actually missed that. And he used to tell me, “I miss that, and I want you to put me to bed and just stay with me till I fall asleep.” And I just say, “I’m sorry, baby. But I have to be in bed.” I felt bad about it, but I was really obsessed. Deeandra: They told me that I had to be in bed every night at the same time, and I followed these rules, every night at the same time. And I just believe that I was actually setting myself for success if I go to bed early because I said to myself, “Okay, if I’m in bed by 9:00 and I didn’t sleep, so I have lots of time so I can try to sleep.” And at one point I will sleep, but what would actually happen, that I would go to bed at 9:00, and I’m still awake after three hours because I was not actually sleepy when I went to bed at 9:00. At midnight, I would be anxious and panicking and saying, “This is going to be a sleepless night and so on.” Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. It’s so difficult. I think insomnia really likes to trick us. It’s almost like it tries to do deals with us. For example, “Don’t read to your son. Make sure you go to bed at 9:00, and then you’ll feel better.” That’s what insomnia is telling us to do. But insomnia has an ulterior motive. Insomnia is telling us to do that kind of stuff because that’s what gives insomnia the oxygen it needs to stick around. And say, it is a really tricky customer, insomnia. And this is why it can be helpful to just address any of these changes we can recognize we’ve made in response to insomnia that haven’t really proven to be helpful or haven’t really added to our quality of life because it is so easy to remove all those important things from our lives to protect our sleep or create better conditions for sleep. Martin Reed: You just touched on reading to your son, missing out on that wind-down routine, that used to be really enjoyable, that quality time you’d spend with your husband. We do all these things that end up moving us from the kind of life you want to live. And they don’t really have any effect on sleep itself because we’re still setting ourselves up for longer periods of wakefulness by doing things like going to bed before we feel sleepy enough for sleep. But we’re also… What else are we doing? We are kind of giving sleep a really negative role in our lives when our whole life just revolves around sleep, and our behaviors change in a way that leads to less quality of life because of sleep. It just changes our whole relationship with it. Deeandra: Yeah. Absolutely. I totally agree. Yeah. Martin Reed: You touched upon that thing, that behavior change that you found really helpful which was just going to bed later, going to bed when you felt a stronger sense of sleepiness. Were there any other behaviors that you changed to help create better conditions for sleep, or that just helped improve your quality of life during the day that now on reflection you can look back on and say, “That was helpful. That really helped me.” Deeandra: Yeah. Well, starting from… I said to myself, “Whatever nights I had the night before, I’m just going to live my life. I’m just going to go out and exercise and I’m just going to stay to insomnia, basically.” I don’t care, anymore if I have insomnia. Maybe I slept for a couple of hours the night before, and I was tired, then I didn’t feel like doing much, but I would basically just act like nothing was happening and I would just try my best to do everything I wanted to do during the day. I would go out, and just basically be active during the day instead of lying down, and just canceling plans or not just during my usual activities. And I changed that, I said, “No, I’m not just going to live insomnia win anymore.” Deeandra: I basically started to, little by little every day, doing something more. I started to go out for walks. And even if I had dinner plans, I would go out, even if I didn’t have much sleep the night before. And I would go to the gym and exercise and even if I was tired. So yeah, I definitely changed that. And then, I said to myself, “Eight hours.” Maybe after reading your tips and tricks and your advices and I thought, “Eight hours is not for everyone. I can survive on less. So, why am I going to bed at a ridiculous time? I mean, at 9:00.” I have to like… If I give myself the time I need at the end of the day to do something with my husband or do something I enjoy, I’m relaxing so I’m probably creating a better condition for sleep. Deeandra: Even if I get five hours, and I’m productive the next day, this is fine for me. I mean, it’s not a big deal then. I mean, nothing will happen. I mean, maybe I just need that. Maybe, I don’t need eight hours anyway. So, I started to get to go to bed later. Yeah, I mean, I just… Basically, caring less, I had all these rituals before bed really in a manic way. I mean, I really just prepare everything like I was going to war basically. My sleepy time tea has to be ready at this time, and I have to be under the covers at this time, and I shouldn’t watch any TV shows that was interesting before bed. Deeandra: I would watch only boring shows before bed. If I’m interested in watching a show and I like it, I wouldn’t watch it before bed because I said, “No, I have to watch a show that I really saw a million times that wouldn’t engage my mind.” So, I would only watch boring movies and old, boring movies and old boring shows that I didn’t even enjoy anymore. But I had to do that because I would be awake if I watched something that really interested me and engaged me. And yeah, so I stopped the rituals, basically. I just said, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Really, it doesn’t matter.” Basically, yeah, that’s it. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think that idea that we need to get a certain amount of sleep like eight hours is often thrown out there. I can just be one of these extra things, right, that it’s just more pressure that we put on ourselves to make sleep happen or to generate sleep. But nobody really knows where this eight hours came from. We don’t have much evidence that says human beings need eight hours of sleep. We just look at ranges of average sleep durations and try and guess from there. But I think sleep duration is like height. It’s something that we all have a unique height, or we’re all going to be at a certain height. We’re all going to generate a certain amount of sleep. And that’s different for everyone. And trying to get a certain amount of sleep or a certain type of sleep is a bit like trying to grow seven-foot tall. Martin Reed: It’s something we can’t control. And anytime we have averages involved, so if we say, “An average person will sleep six to eight hours,” something like that. There are always going to be happy, healthy people that exist outside those ranges because we are just looking at averages. And something else that can compound this concern about sleep duration is the fact that when we ask an average person who has no issues with sleep, how much sleep they get, they usually just guess based on when they went to bed and when they got out of bed, and they just count that whole time as sleep. So, they tend to overestimate how much sleep they get which is probably why we tend to get closer to eight hours when we’re asking people. But then, when we’re struggling with insomnia, all those prolonged periods of wakefulness can seem to be more intense. And studies show that we tend to underestimate the amount of sleep we get when we’re struggling with insomnia. Martin Reed: So that just makes this gap between our situation, the amount of sleep we are getting when we have insomnia, and where we want to be, just makes that gaps feel even wider, which can then just create more worry, more anxiety, and we put more pressure on ourselves to sleep and engage in more of those sleep efforts for something that we really have no control over. We can certainly create better conditions for sleep, but there’s nothing we can do to make sleep happen on command for us to get the amount of sleep or a certain type of sleep that we’re after. Deeandra: Yeah, absolutely. And actually, I just remember reading in your emails that sleep can’t be controlled. You can’t control sleep. Sleep will just actually happen on its own. It’s a built-in mechanism, and you can’t just control it. And yeah, I mean, when I read that, I said, “Okay. I have to lose some control here,” because I was basically trying to control it in a very obsessive way, so I have to just let it go. Now, let go of all the obsessing about it, all the controlling, everything, just let go, and it could happen on its own. Yeah. Martin Reed: But it’s really hard to do that. Right? Because even if we hear this over and over again, we need to abandon that control, abandon that obsession. It’s hard because the brain by default is wired to want to engage in rituals, to put effort into problems, and to troubleshoot them. How do you go from logically understanding that “Yeah, I need to lose control. I need to just stop trying to get involved in the process to actually taking action and doing it”? How do you make that transition? Because it’s difficult. Right? Deeandra: Well, actually, I challenged myself. I said to myself, “Okay, I will just not care and see how I’m feeling.” I mean, I was getting even two hours of sleep, three hours of sleep even, and the next day I would actually be productive, and I would go through the day, and I do everything I wanted to do. And I was fine at the end of the day, and nothing happened. I didn’t go insane. My job didn’t suffer. My family didn’t suffer. My health didn’t suffer. Everything was fine. I mean, and then I started getting a little bit more, I mean, four hours of sleep. So, my theory proved to be right. Nothing will happen. I mean, sleep is just… You don’t need to obsess about the eight hours, the rituals, and you just have to lose control because there’s no switch. Deeandra: I mean, I’m actually… Maybe because I’m a go-getter, when I want something I would work on it. I would just obsess about it. Maybe the obsession here has a positive side because when I put some… I mean, I obsess about something, I obtain it. If I really wanted to get my driver’s license, for example, I would study in an obsessive way, and I would just practice and practice and practice to get it. And then, I got my driver’s license. And then the same thing I applied for sleep. Before, I would say, “Okay, I have to work on sleep.” So, I would obsess about it, and try to work on it. And I would just try all this stuff. I would try like the… I heard about this heavy blanket that you would put on your preferred bed to calm you or something. It was called the gravity blanket, I believe. I would try that. Deeandra: I would try so many stuff, even supplements and ashwaganda and maybe melatonin and lots of stuff just to… Because I believe that if I put effort in sleep, it will improve. But yeah, it’s the only thing in life actually that you shouldn’t really put any effort in. And it doesn’t respond to the effort at all. You shouldn’t really try anything on sleep. The more effort you try, the more stuff you try, the more supplements, the more rituals, the more… And it doesn’t really respond to effort. It’s just natural. It’s like breathing at the end of the day. Martin Reed: Yeah, it is. And I love that analogy about breathing. I mean, I use it all the time because breathing is something that we can temporarily control. Right? We can hold our breath, or we can breathe really quickly, but it’s not something we can successfully control for very long. And we can hold our breath, but eventually, no matter how determined we are, we’re going to breathe. Our body is just going to remove us from the equation and make us breathe. And insomnia and sleep is like that. No matter how desperate we are feeling, if we’ve been awake for 48 hours, not even a minute of sleep, sooner or later the body is just going to remove us from the process and make some sleep happen. The body will always generate at the very least the minimum amount of sleep we need in just the same way that it will always ensure that we take the exact number of breaths that we need to take throughout the day. Martin Reed: It’s just something that we don’t need to put that effort and all that energy into trying to control or to get involved in. But like you’ve said, it is completely understandable why we would do that because when we have a problem, we want to fix it. But sleep is that one thing in life that just does not respond well to effort. But that doesn’t mean that we need to be resigned to living with chronic insomnia. It just means that we can shift those efforts to where they can be helpful so we can do things like starting to reintroduce, starting to reclaim our lives, doing things again that are important to us, only going to bed when we are sleepy enough for sleep, not engaging in all these rituals that probably deep in the back of our minds we probably know aren’t proving to be helpful, at least over the long term. It’s just so difficult. Deeandra: Yeah. And actually, I have an idea that maybe lots of people who struggle with insomnia tend to be control freaks in their life. Maybe, I’m wrong, but that is the idea that I get because we like to control everything. We want what we want. And they tend to be, people who are really goal-oriented and they want to reach their goals, so say they apply this mentality to sleep, and they try to get their goal of sleep. I will try everything. I’ll just put more effort. I will try harder. I will just try to apply everything I know to get this magic sleep, which is actually, you don’t really need to do anything, basically. Deeandra: Just like my husband, of course, I have a husband who is the world best sleeper, who doesn’t do anything to sleep, to generate sleep. And he always say, “I don’t know. I just go to bed and I sleep. I don’t do anything special.” Yeah, I mean, you don’t really need to do anything. Yeah. It’s like you never… Something that I always say to myself, I even heard that in one of your podcast episodes that “You will never just forget how to sleep. Sleep, it’s a function. It’s a biological function that we have.” And that really, really helped me because at one point I really thought that I lost this ability. And now I know, and I will never doubt that anymore. That just like I will never forget how to breathe, I will never forget how to sleep. It’s a built-in mechanism. It’ll never disappear or go away, or it just won’t happen. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. And this is another reason why I just love the way that we can explore our thoughts about sleep, our relationship with sleep, and change our behaviors around sleep to start insomnia or the oxygen it needs to survive because these are really, at the end of the day, they’re skills. So, once we’ve harnessed these skills, we’ve practiced them, and we are sleeping better, I think it makes us more resilient because we have this completely new understanding about sleep, insomnia. And we know that we are armed with these techniques that are going to be with us forever. So, if we ever find ourselves struggling in the future, we can feel so much more confident that we can react in a way that will minimize the length of our sleep disruption. So that one or two difficult nights aren’t going to be the return of a long-term problem again. Deeandra: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, sure. Martin Reed: Yeah. How long do you feel the process was for you from the time when you were really, really struggling to learning new insights about sleep and insomnia, gaining more knowledge about it, changing some behaviors, bringing back all those things back into your life that you’d maybe pushed away. How long would you say that process was to where you felt more confident that that sleep was no longer a big issue in your life? Deeandra: Well, I think I tried… I saw an improvement after about, I think a month or something, three weeks to a month. I saw some improvements in my sleep, and then just applying more behavioral changes and more advices that I saw in your emails and tips that I got from your videos and your podcast. And I saw an improvement little by little. After a month, I would say that I started to see that I was sleeping better, maybe not perfectly, but I was still sleeping better, and I was productive the next day. Deeandra: And when I started to see that, I was really encouraged to go on, and this is working. This is actually the only thing that is actually working. No medication, no supplements, just working on my mentality toward sleep, and changing my behaviors, changing the way I thought about sleep is working. And it was really helpful because when I saw this improvement, I saw… Before I thought that I had no hope at one point, and I was just destined to be stuck on medication for the rest of my life, or destined to have this life that was just full of fatigue and tiredness. Deeandra: And after trying all these tips, I saw an improvement. It was really a ray of hope for me. And I really… Yeah. I mean, it was really great to see that because I didn’t believe at first that only changing my behaviors would help so much, but I was wrong because it started to get better. And maybe at first, I was just getting maybe five hours and then just after that, it was a little bit more. Deeandra: And I actually saw myself an improvement in the way I felt. Even at my time, when I would be awake, I would be less anxious because I would always remember… Your voice is actually really soothing by the way. I don’t know if someone had already said that to you, but I would always remember a phrase that you would say after each episode of your podcast that you can sleep. And it would really calm me because I would remember, “You can sleep. You can sleep. It’ll happen at one point.” You shouldn’t control it. And those tips, yeah, I mean, little by little, it started to get better. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. What’s sleep like for you these days? If you just think back on your sleep over the last couple of weeks, or so, what’s an average night like for you now? Deeandra: Well, I would say about six or seven hours every night, which is really okay for me. I mean, it’s perfect. Actually, I feel great. I don’t feel the tiredness after six or seven hours, so this is fine for me. I do struggle every once in a while, maybe once a month, because as we said, we are more predisposed to insomnia because maybe I’m having some anxious thoughts or maybe I had a stressful day, but it will never last more than one night or a couple of nights. And I would always apply all the behaviors that I learned, and all the tips that you shared, and it would never be this panic or this anxiety-inducing thing. Deeandra: I mean, it would just be this, “Okay. I had a bad night of sleep. It will get better. It will pass.” And it passes, it never goes on. So, right now, it’s really going better. I mean, I would say my sleep at one point is maybe the sleep I had before, all of these problems. I started to see some improvements even before all this I thought that I was a really great sleeper, and now, sometimes I even get maybe eight hours of sleep or even nine hours of sleep if I can. And really, I thought that I would never get that naturally anymore. Even like having that, it’s really even built my confidence that really you don’t need anything to sleep. You can still get this nine hours. You can still get to those eight hours naturally. So, yeah, it’s going well. It’s going well. Martin Reed: That’s great. I always think that the real transformation is when there’s a change in how we respond to those one-off difficult nights. So instead of a difficult night, just triggering all this worry and panic and changing what we do during the day, being able to see a bad night for what it is, a bad night, a difficult night, and not responding in the same way as we might have done when we were really caught up in the insomnia struggle. I think that’s the real sign that a transformation has occurred, and that insomnia will never be able to work its way back into our lives again. That was really powerful for you to talk about that. “I still have some difficult nights every once in a while, but the way I respond to them, my interpretation of them, is completely different now.” I think you’ve already implied it, but are you finding that just your days now and just your overall quality of life has changed? Deeandra: Yeah. Absolutely. Honestly, I mean, in the past I would say, “This is just going to be my life now. I would just be this person who won’t be able to do much in life, basically.” And now, honestly, it feels like a new beginning for me to be honest, because I now can do so much stuff. Actually, I went back to school. Martin Reed: Oh, great. Deeandra: After getting better with those insomnia. And after seeing that I don’t need to put things on hold. I now applied for my master’s degree. This is a great win for me and a huge step that I need to take. Yeah. And just in general, even going on vacation or… This used to be a huge concern for me, by the way. Deeandra: I would always think that I couldn’t go on vacation, for example, because I would say, “I can’t sleep on a new bed. The hotels, maybe the bed is not comfortable. And then my vacation would be ruined by insomnia so I can’t go away.” And actually for three years, I didn’t go on any vacations at all. I mean, it’s just really sad because the best… Maybe there was some important anniversaries or maybe some birthdays or something that I missed on. And now, I can do that. I would say to myself, “Even if I go away, and I didn’t sleep for one night because maybe you have to catch an early flight or something. That’s fine. That’s fine.” Everybody has those one-off night every once in a while. It will never be a problem. I will never panic about it. So, yeah, I would say that my quality of life really, really changed. Yeah, in a much better way. Yeah. Martin Reed: That’s great. Well, Deeandra, I really appreciate all the time that you’ve taken to talk about your experience. There is just one last question I would love to ask you because I ask every single guest this question, so I don’t want you to feel left out. So, the question is this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and feels as though they’ve tried everything that they’re beyond help, and that they cannot do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Deeandra: I would say, I totally understand what you’re going through. Not everybody understands, honestly, that insomnia can be really, really difficult. I know because I’ve been there. I know you’re struggling. But don’t lose hope. And contact Martin, of course, because he’s really really patient and helpful. And I believe that he really likes to help people. Your life will get better and you can get through this. And yeah, I mean, search for the website, listen to the podcast, and contact Martin, and maybe just give it a try, and just see for yourself. Yeah. I mean, I believe that insomnia can be really difficult and lowing at sometimes, and we just feel like it’s hopeless at one point, but you really should try it and you’re not alone. And I use hug to be honest because you already need it because I know it’s difficult. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well, that’s great. And I think that’s a really, really good note to end on. Thanks again, Deeandra for coming out, taking some time out of your day to come onto the podcast. I just know that your story, your experience is going to help a lot of people. Thank you so much. Deeandra: Thank you. Thank you, Martin. Thank you. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Wayne’s experience with insomnia began when he was preparing for his board exams. Because he needed to get up earlier than usual, he started going to bed earlier than usual. Unfortunately, this made it harder for Wayne to fall asleep — and, as a result, nights started to become stressful and he began to experience a lot of sleep-related anxiety. In an effort to address this sleep disruption, Wayne started implementing a number of sleep hygiene rituals. He experimented with sleep supplements and started to record, analyze, and evaluate every aspect of his sleep. Unfortunately, these actions — although completely understandable — served only to perpetuate his insomnia. Ultimately, Wayne got his sleep back on track by recognizing that sleep is a natural process that doesn’t require or respond well to effort. He started to go to bed later at night. He started to make some space for difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions rather than trying to fight them, and he reminded himself that sleep always happens in the end. This process took time but today, Wayne thinks of sleep as a friend — not as an enemy or something to be feared. He no longer puts pressure on himself to sleep and he no longer puts any effort into sleep. As a result, he sleeps well and is living the kind of life he wants to live. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Wayne. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Wayne Tan: Thank you for having me. Martin Reed: I’m really excited to go through everything we’ve got planned to discuss, but we’re never going to get anywhere unless we start at the beginning, so let’s start there. If you could just give us an idea of when your sleep problems first began and what you think maybe caused those initial issues with sleep. Wayne Tan: Okay. Yeah. My sleep problems started back in March of 2020, right around the beginning of COVID. It all happened around the time when I was preparing for my board exams for optometry school. I remember at the time I had given myself a very strict bedtime that I wanted to meet in order to basically prepare myself, not only mentally and also academically for boards, but I wanted to have a good sleep schedule. Typically, I was a person who went to bed at 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, a little bit later. You could consider me a night owl, but for this exam that I was preparing for, I had to get up basically around 6:30 or 7:00. To me, that was very daunting. I told myself I need to get the bed by 11:00 at the latest. I put this pressure on myself to really get to bed around that time. That was around March when the test was going to be. That’s when it all started. Martin Reed: Okay. What were those nights like when you started to experience those sleep disruption? Was it difficulty first falling asleep? Because I’m guessing that from what you said, you started to go bed a little bit earlier in order to try and make up for the fact that you’re going to be also waking up a bit earlier. Were you having issues falling asleep or was it more to do with waking during the night and then finding it hard to fall back to sleep? Or maybe it was the double whammy and a little bit of both. Wayne Tan: Yeah, it was a little bit of both, but mainly, for me, personally, it was falling asleep. If I fell asleep, most of the time, I could get through the night. Those nights were very stress driven and there was just a lot of anxiety that surrounded the nights. I can still specifically remember the night when it all started was about a week before the exam. I started taking sleep supplements to try to get to bed and even took NyQuil to try to get to bed. Wayne Tan: One night, I remember just taking some NyQuil and not being able to fall asleep. This panic kind of set in, thinking to myself, “What if this was exam night? I would not be able to sleep and I’m tired. I’m on beds and I’m not falling asleep.” I think my sleep… My relationship and my thought about sleep kind of broke down there, but most of my nights, to answer your question, were just difficulty falling asleep when I would spend upwards of two, three hours to fall asleep. Some days I couldn’t fall asleep until like 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning. Martin Reed: Wow. Yeah. I think one of the big challenges with insomnia is not only does it affect us at night, but it really can affect us during the day too. It’s like this thing that’s seems to be with us 24 hours a day. How were you finding it… If anything, were you finding that it was affecting your days as well? What were your days like when you were going through this struggle with sleep? Wayne Tan: I think in the beginning, before I went through all of my treatment, my thought about how my day was was very much to how I slept that night. If I’d only slept two or three hours, it just kind of… I just got this idea in my head that my day was going to be terrible, was going to be tiring. The days were just harder because I think I had put that impression on myself and that’s how it was. It was difficult, the days that I didn’t get sleep. You kind of spend your day kind of thinking about it, and it was quite consuming to go through it. Martin Reed: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You kind of touched upon it already in terms of the supplements and the over-the-counter stuff. Were there any other kind of things that you tried to get your sleep back on track or to fix this issue before you started implementing these behavior-change techniques, which we’ll talk about in a moment, that on reflection, you now think those probably weren’t that helpful, “All these things that I did”. Can you think of anything else that you’ve tried? Wayne Tan: Yeah, I spent a lot of time researching the internet and there were a lot of sleep hygiene things that were recommended. One of the biggest ones was just kind of removing yourself from any screen time before bed. I even got one of those lights that mimicked UV rays that I would kind of just shine at myself during the day to I guess, try to build my circadian rhythm, but all along, I wanted… I was always afraid of getting into a habit of depending on any substance in order to fall asleep. I actually, for the most part, stayed away from the supplements after I’ve developed this chronic insomnia. Wayne Tan: Then in the beginning, I was relying on it, but I think I grew fairly afraid of taking anything internally. I even saw a sleep specialist and they recommended me to have a sleep study and she prescribed, I believe it was Tramadol for me for the nights that I can’t sleep to fall asleep. I remember filling the prescription and to this day, I’ve only ever had half of a pill and never touched that stuff. Wayne Tan: I tried to stay away from it, but aside from that, I tried a lot of different things, trying to meditate before bed. I just felt like I was creating a lot of ritual around bed. It became almost like a obsessive worship of it. I think after going through the treatment with you, I’ve kind of… You helped me discover that although those things are good on their own that my obsessiveness with it actually made it counterintuitive and didn’t help me as it should. Another thing that I would do was I would have these “down times” right before bed. For a while, I thought there were working for me, so there were nights when I didn’t get to have my ritualistic downtime. I always thought to myself, “Uh-oh, this is the night that I won’t be falling asleep.” Martin Reed: Yeah. I remember when we were working together, this was one of the things we discussed, how your insomnia followed this really predictable path. You know how we have this actual model for the development of insomnia, the 3P model, where the first P is predisposition. Some of us are just predisposed not necessarily to chronic insomnia, but just to temporary sleep disruption from time to time. In your case, for example, recognizing that you’re a strong night owl and then knowing that you’re going to have to change your routine, that can trigger some temporary sleep disruption, which is the second P the precipitating event, whatever it is that triggers the sleep disruption. Again, really clear for you. You’re like this model textbook case, right? Wayne Tan: Yeah. Martin Reed: You were doing your studying, you had the exams, you had to get up earlier, a whole different schedule to what your body was used to. Normally, probably more than nine times out of 10, when whatever that trigger is is no longer relevant or we’ve adapted to it, our sleep just gets back on track. But if it doesn’t, that’s where that third P comes into play. It’s all these perpetuating factors. Martin Reed: This is just a symptom of being a human being that wants to fix problems. We do things like going to bed earlier, maybe even staying in bed later on the weekends to try and catch up on sleep on napping during the day, doing all that research, rituals, experiments, all that stuff that is done with the best of intentions and seems quite logical when we’re doing them, but they kind of backfire on us and they can end up making sleep more difficult. They perpetuate the problem. Martin Reed: I’d like to just talk about that. I like to just mention that model because it helps us recognize that what we’re experiencing isn’t unique and that there are those perpetuating factors that we can influence and we can control. Although we can’t control sleep itself, we can definitely control our behaviors in a way that helps create better conditions for sleep, removes any of those behaviors that might be perpetuating sleep disruption. We can also do things that explore our relationship with our sleep-related thoughts and just sleep itself that can help tackle those perpetuating factors too. Wayne Tan: Yeah. It’s funny, you mentioned that. People are typically problem solvers, so when you have a problem, you try to solve it. That really speaks to my character. I’m always a person when I see a problem, there’s got to be a solution. You got to go and figure out the solution. I’m in medicine, so that is even ingrained in me and trained since I was a student to kind of look at it that way. I think for me hat was really the perpetuating factor. Wayne Tan: I guess I just spent so much time thinking about how to fix the problem when in fact the solution is to really forget about it. Even though that was told to me, it was such a hard thing for me to let go, to actually let go of the problem and just trust that it’s kind of a thing that you can’t try to put effort into sleep. That really speaks to me. Sorry, could you repeat the last question that you asked? Martin Reed: Yeah. I was just summarizing how in cases of insomnia, they’re pretty much identical from person to person. Although our individual circumstances can be unique, the insomnia itself usually isn’t and how your experience was almost like this textbook example. You’ve got these clear predisposing factor, this clear precipitating factor and then all these clear perpetuating factors, so this desire to fix a problem, which is this human trait. Especially when we have kind of a very analytical mind or a very scientific mind. Martin Reed: We can get tripped up here because everything in life responds well to effort. I can’t think of anything that doesn’t usually respond well to effort apart from sleep. Our brain is naturally telling us you’ve got to put effort into sleep here. You’ve got to try to sleep. You’ve got to make sleep happen. You’ve got to control sleep. You’ve got to get a certain amount of sleep, a certain type of sleep. Do it, make it happen. As soon as we put that effort in, that’s when we tend to get caught up in the struggle because sleep doesn’t respond her to effort or to pressure. Martin Reed: The only thing that can make sleep happen is being awake for long enough. That really is all we can do, but that’s not to say… Just like you touched upon, it’s hard to say, “Okay, I just need to stop trying. I need to stop putting effort into it,” because we naturally want to fix a problem. This is why I think these behavioral change techniques can be helpful because they still give us an outlet for that effort. We’ve still got tasks that we can do that help create better conditions for sleep. We’re kind of redirecting our efforts in a more constructive and positive way on setting the stage for sleep rather than trying to make sleep happen. Wayne Tan: Yeah. That reminds me of something that we were working on. For me, thinking about sleep during the day was a really big problem for me. Something you told me to do was kind of limit yourself, kind of allow yourself to still think about it, but set a window for yourself to… I don’t remember how much time you allotted me, but it was like 15 minutes or 20 minutes a day where I’m allowed to think and research sleep as much as I want. But after that point you, you just got to let it go. Wayne Tan: I think that was also really, really helpful. Another thing that I was obsessively doing was kind of keep focusing on the numbers during the nights and tracking the sleep efficiency and how much sleep I was getting per night. I think there came a point when you were like, “Just forget about keeping track of the numbers and just let it happen.” I think that was a really big turning point for me was just learning to let all of it go. Martin Reed: The tracking can really be like this double edged sword because when I’m working with clients, many clients find it helpful to just start filling out some sleep journals just with best guesses, which is what I always encourage. If someone’s going to start filling out a sleep diary of when they went to bed, how much time they think they spent awake, for example, things like this, I always encourage them to just use your best guess because we don’t want you to be checking the time throughout the whole night getting, “I was awake for 17 and a half minutes at 3:07 AM.” Things like that, not helpful because we have to be alert to be able to record all those things. Martin Reed: If we’re giving the brain all those tasks, we’re not creating good conditions for sleep. Some clients just don’t find it helpful at all. They really benefit from just not even keeping any kind of sleep log and every week or two, just thinking, “How do I feel I did over the past couple of weeks? That’s just fine too because sleep is so subjective anyway. One person would feel great after five hours of sleep. One person would feel terrible after five hours of sleep. The numbers themselves don’t really matter. All that really matters is how we feel about our sleep. We really don’t have to be that analytical about tracking it and it just… Martin Reed: It’s one of those things that can just draw more attention to sleep, especially if we get hooked into using all those activity tracking devices with the apps and stuff. First thing, we do in the morning is check all the data. Another reason why they sometimes can trip us up is there’s not really anything we can do with that information anyway. If you learn that you’ve got X amount of a certain sleep stage, for example, well, there’s nothing you can do to change your sleep architecture. If it tells you you’ve been awake for a certain amount of time during the night, there’s not really anything you can do in response to actually cut that down. We can influence things, but we can’t actually directly control any of that information. Really it’s just extra external noise that we have to deal with. Wayne Tan: I’m glad that you said that sleep is subjective from person to person. Going back to what I said earlier, in the beginning, when I would get like two hours of sleep, I would just say to myself, “Today is going to be a terrible day. I will say one benefit that I got from going through all of the chronic insomnia was I’ve learned to live life normally with just a few hours of sleep. These days I don’t really let myself get influenced by that. Wayne Tan: For the most part, I get really good sleep, but there occasionally comes a day or two when not even that I can’t fall asleep, but there are just… I’m busy with work or whatever the circumstances, and then I’m not getting as much sleep as I like. Those days really don’t influence me the way they used to because I realized that I can function really well even if it’s just a few hours of sleep. The people who learn to live… Insomniacs are people who are really good at going through their day with minimal sleep. Wayne Tan: That is something that… It’s how you kind of view your sleep, your relationship about sleep. I think this program really did teach me to kind of really view your sleep. It’s something that you… Sometimes you can do it on your own, but I felt like I was one of those people who needed a guidance in kind of changing my mindset about how I viewed it. Martin Reed: Yeah. Let’s talk about that a little bit more because I remember when we first started working together. It was over a year ago now. I think it was like a year and three months or something like that. When you first came to me, you said that you had been implementing CBT-I techniques, but you felt a little bit frustrated or you weren’t getting the result you were hoping for. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? What kind of techniques, first and foremost, were you implementing and for how long? What was it about the process that you felt unhappy or uncomfortable with? Wayne Tan: I initially was doing sleep journaling and just keeping really, really good records about how I slept, how much I slept, what time I went to bed, my sleep efficiency. It was all color coded. It was something like a person’s who’s problem solving would do. Limiting my sleep was kind of also part of it. I have to say that it was helpful and that there were days when I would get my seven, eight hours of sleep. I think that became my issue. My biggest issue that I ran into was not getting very consistent results. I think I was the person to blame for that because I would get good stretches of sleep, maybe three or four days where I would fall asleep within 15, 20 minutes. Wayne Tan: Then I would kind of relax on my restrictions a bit thinking, “You know what? I think I’m good. I think I’ve reached that point.” Sometimes just getting out of that too early became my issue. Not only that, but there was still a lot of, I guess, bad views that I had of sleep that still lingered in my mind about it. I think ultimately for insomnia to finally go away, it really was changing your mindset about how you viewed sleep. I think that that was some… I needed you to help me with that. Martin Reed: Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Because everyone listening to this is going to be like, “I recognize that I probably do need to change my mindset about sleep and my relationship with sleep, but how do we do that?” Do you have any tips for people listening to this? How were you able to do that? Wayne Tan: It’s such a simple phrase that you said to me, but, but it really stuck to me. It was like sleep is always going to win in the end. You’re going to fall asleep. It’s harder to try to stay awake for an extended amount of time than it is to sleep. You are naturally going to sleep. That’s something you can’t fight. It will happen. Maybe it doesn’t happen tonight, but it’s sure going to happen eventually. I guess that confidence that you have that sleep will come is what you really need because a person who’s not suffering from insomnia, they have a ton of confidence that sleep is going to come every night they lay down, maybe not instantly, but it’s going to come. Wayne Tan: People going through insomnia, what they lose is that confidence that sleep is going to come. Like I said, it’s a such a simple phrase that you said, but the nights when I lay there on, when my mind is racing and I’m wondering, “Am I going to sleep tonight? How is my day going to be if I don’t sleep?” That phrase pops up again and I remind myself sleep is going to come. You can try to fight it, but it will always win in the end. Martin Reed: That’s just something we cannot deny. It’s just a fact. No matter how entrenched our insomnia is we can always remember times when we have got some sleep, even if it’s just a couple of hours, because our body will always generate sleep, but yet when we’re really in the throes of insomnia, really struggling, our brains like to tell us, “Oh, you’ve had a difficult… You had no sleep last night. That means you’re going to have no sleep tonight and then no sleep the next night and no sleep the next night, but from a biological perspective, that cannot be true. Martin Reed: But it’s just our brain looking out for us. Our brain is there to protect us and do good for us, help us live the best life we can. It’s kind of like this really overly enthusiastic friend. It’s like, “Do this. You’re going to do great. How are you doing? Let’s do this. Let’s do that. How’s it going now?” It’s just trying so hard to help us out that it can kind of get in the way, but the truth is even when our brain is looking out for us and warning us that you had no sleep last night. “What if that happens again tonight? What if that happens the night after?”, the truth of the matter is that sleep always happens in the end. When we’ve been awake for long enough, we will always sleep. And that the body is always going to generate, at the very least, the minimum amount of sleep we need. It will always generate that. Martin Reed: Where we struggle to get more than the bare minimum is often down to those efforts. That human desire to get more sleep or to get better quality of sleep. When we get involved in that process, once the body has kind of generated that bare minimum, as soon as we then get involved, that’s when we can start disrupting that natural process because we’ve already got that bare minimum so the body can actually be awake now. When we get more than the bare minimum, it’s when we can take that step of removing ourselves from that process. Wayne Tan: I think there’s just pressure that you put on yourself. I think for me personally, that’s how it all started. Then that pressure turned into just my… The way I viewed sleep just morphed. Sleep is our friend and not something to be afraid of, but it became something that I was afraid of. I dread going to bed at night and laying there with the possibility of not falling asleep. I think what ultimately has to take place is you have to not be afraid of it anymore and see it as a friend that it’s always been in your life and that there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just your perception of sleep has changed. Martin Reed: A lot of clients that I work with find it helpful to just reframe the process of going to bed instead of this being now it’s time for sleep. It can just be now it’s time to just relax and rest, just changing the goal because as soon as you make sleep the goal, we’re more likely to put pressure on ourselves. We’re more likely to put effort into the process, these things aren’t helpful, but if we just make… I’m just going to go to bed, rest, relax, see what happens, sometimes that can create those better conditions for sleep because we’re helping to remove our goals and our expectations from that process. Wayne Tan: Yeah. I remember even reading research papers on how there were studies where people were told to try to sleep as quickly as they can, and in the control group, they were just told to sleep. The people who were told simply to sleep slept quicker, whereas the people who were told to actively try to sleep ended up spending more time than they would normally average would spend trying to get to sleep. Sleep, it’s just one of those things just really cannot require effort. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really interesting study, that one, and I like to refer to that one with a lot of the clients that I work with. As soon as we do try, that’s when we struggle the most. In that study you mentioned, I think it was maybe even like college students that slept great. They chose the healthiest people they could find, the people that generally set the best, but as soon as they said, “Right, we’ll give you like $100 or whatever to whoever falls asleep the fastest,” oh man, there was no sleep happening in that group anymore because of that effort. Wayne Tan: Yeah. Yeah. Martin Reed: We’ve talked a lot about the cognitive side, the mind side of things. That’s definitely a big part of the puzzle. We also touched upon a couple of those behavioral changes like you started to allot a little bit less time for sleep. Instead of starting to go to bed really early, maybe start going to bed a little bit later, just to reduce that opportunity for long periods of wakefulness and to build up that biological sleep drive, that natural urge, that pressure to sleep because you’re going to be a wait for longer. Were there any other techniques on the behavioral side that you found to be particularly helpful? Wayne Tan: The idea of going to bed later and spending less time in bed, that definitely does work. I was kind of a skeptic at first. It just seemed so counterintuitive, but it really works there. I don’t remember there was much… I feel like now that so much time has passed since my initial struggle with it, it seems like such a distant past, but I don’t really recall… Aside from just kind of having all these different rituals, which really wasn’t helpful for me, sometimes I like to drink tea at night. I cut that out of my life after I think 5:00. That was something I did, but now that everything’s gone back to normal, I realized that it doesn’t really help no matter how much tea I drink. I can still go to bed because that’s normal for me. I can sleep just fine. That is more of a hygiene than anything. Martin Reed: Yeah. Exactly. I think everyone listening to this is going to identify with those rituals that we try, especially all this sleep hygiene stuff, which isn’t usually helpful once we are at that stage, where we’ve got the chronic insomnia because this is now… We’re in the stage where it’s all those perpetuating factors that are at play. Often those perpetuating factors include all the rituals, “I’m going to try and meditate my way to sleep. I’m going to try this supplement. I’m going to try this tea,” or, “I’m going to take stuff away. I’m going to stop drinking coffee in the morning. I’m going to stop eating a certain food that I really enjoy just in case that could be influencing things.” Martin Reed: Just being able to abandon all those rituals, even if it doesn’t seem to have a direct change or influence on your sleep, first and foremost, in the short term, I have clients that tell me, “Wow, it just fell so liberating just to be able to remove all of that stuff and just make the approach of bedtime less this list of chores that I have to do, that I have to implement. I’ve kind of got that time back now.” Wayne Tan: Yeah, absolutely. Like you said, it’s liberating. It also kind of frees you in a way that you’re not really dependent on it. You really aren’t. You don’t need to do all of those things in order to fall asleep. When I was going through it, like I kind of briefly mentioned earlier I would, if didn’t get this ritual done, at the back of my mind, it just crept up as this question of, “Did I screw it up tonight?” It’s liberating to not have to think about those things and put all these restrictions on yourself. I think certainly there’s a place for them. You shouldn’t drink a giant cup of coffee before you go to bed. It’s certainly not going to be fuel for you to sleep, but it is very much of a behavioral, psychological battle that happens. Martin Reed: Yeah, definitely. You touched upon a good point there. Not only if we miss one of those rituals, that can in turn kind of lead to more worry. That, in effect, can make it more difficult, but even if we try implementing this new ritual or doing something new and then we feel like, “Oh yeah, this is working,” or, “I’m sleeping better now.” If we have a difficult night, then we start to worry that that new thing isn’t working anymore. We get caught up going down the rabbit hole of then looking for an alternative or looking for modifications. It can just be like this endless struggle and this… It can be this real distraction for a lot of people. Wayne Tan: And I absolutely did do that. I absolutely did that. Martin Reed: Yeah. You touched upon this earlier. You said that you found it helpful to just kind of ring fence some time during the day to just… Permission to worry or to freak out or to think about sleep as much as you wanted, just so that instead of it being just spread out across the entire day or trying to battle with those thoughts throughout the day… It can be helpful to set aside a little bit of time. Whenever these thoughts or worries crop up, you just be like, “Okay, I’ve noticed these thoughts or these worries cropping up. I’ll address that let’s say 3:00 this afternoon. I’ll give myself 15 minutes to just worry and think about sleep as much as I can.” Martin Reed: I think it can be helpful, like you touched upon, because it can help shift or just condense the amount of time we’re going to spend worrying down. But I think where it can also be really helpful… I don’t know if this was true for you or not in your experience, but I think it can be helpful as a way to recognize that although thoughts and worries can be difficult and uncomfortable, we don’t necessarily have to fear them or be afraid of them because they’re thought processes that the brain generating. Martin Reed: I think when we specifically allot time to worry, human nature is to try and push those thoughts and those emotions away. But when we are kind of giving our mind permission to generate those thoughts and worries for this set time during the day, I think that can be quite powerful as a way of helping us recognize that these are thoughts. They’re nothing more than that. They’re nothing less than that. They’re just thoughts that the brain wants to generate. Wayne Tan: Yeah, it is. Ironically, I’ve also applied that to my day-to-day life now when I have worries. There are some things that pop up in your personal life and you find yourself spending a lot of time thinking about. This is one thing that I’ve learned to just kind of give myself space to think about it. It’s okay, but not to really obsess. I think that is the key, not to spend your whole day thinking about it. Having that safe time set aside for yourself is important, not to shove it down because ultimately it’s difficult to tell somebody to just forget about your worries and it’ll go away. It’s difficult and you will learn that with time, but kind of being gentle and nice to yourself, I think, is really important to get through it. You have to be nice to yourself and taking away any opportunity to worry is not very nice. Martin Reed: Yeah. What I think would be helpful too is just recognizing… I touched one earlier that all these thoughts and worries are… It’s just your brain trying to look out for you, trying to take care of you. It’s not your brain trying to make you feel awful or miserable, although that can certainly be feelings that these thoughts can generate. I think just recognizing that the brain is looking out for us when it’s generating these thoughts and these feelings, they can definitely feel really uncomfortable. Martin Reed: But at the end of the day, we always get to choose our actions in response to them. We can choose to respond in a way that kind of leads to behaviors that we know, from our own experience, don’t usually make us feel better, don’t really help or we can try something new whereby we recognize, we acknowledge that, “Okay, my brain’s looking out for me, generating all these really difficult thoughts and feelings and emotions, but let’s see if I can take some actions that still help me move toward the kind of life I want to live, to implementing behaviors that might be different, might be helpful. Even though all these thoughts and feelings and emotions are present, even though they are difficult, let’s see if we can control our actions in a different way.” Wayne Tan: Yeah. Yeah. It is difficult. It was difficult living with insomnia. It felt like you were held down by weight. Changing your perspective on life really. It’s such a relief to be able to put down that weight. Martin Reed: Yeah, definitely. One thing that I know that you were keen to talk about, and I’d love to hear a little bit from you about it as well, was… Really what our conversation here has been out is how insomnia follows this common path. It’s pretty typical from person to person. The way we look to address those perpetuating factors is usually pretty similar from person to person. We look to change our behaviors in a way that create better conditions for sleep. We help to explore our relationship with all those thoughts and feelings and emotions that our brain is generating in an attempt to look out for us. Martin Reed: Insomnia is pretty much identical from person to person. The way we tackle it is usually pretty much identical from person to person. I believe that you used your experience dealing with chronic insomnia and changing behaviors and your relationship with thoughts to actually help someone else who was going through something similar. Is that right? Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Wayne Tan: Yeah, yeah. I think ever since I’ve gone through this experience and I’m just… I spent a lot of time and also just kind of looking out to make sure that there are people who aren’t also suffering with this. I know it can be fixed and it’s a terrible thing to just kind of hold onto. Anytime I hear people talk about, “Oh, I’m not sleeping well,” I kind of pursue that and ask them about it, but there was a lady who was kind of going through something very similar to what I was going through at my church. Wayne Tan: The circumstances of how this started may be different, but our experiences are relatively similar and you could probably attest to that. But I just kind of spent what I knew about sleep. I think kind of going through and being done with insomnia has taught me how to communicate that with somebody who’s going through that. I think everybody knows and understands this relationship they have with sleep, but it’s only people who suffered through it who can communicate that. Wayne Tan: This is why I think these podcasts that you host are very important not just for people to understand that there’s people out there who are suffering like they are, but also to allow people like me, who’ve gone through it, to be able to express it in words. I think it’s very difficult sometimes to put into words, but this lady who was spending on the orders of three to four hours of just laying in bed tossing and turning, trying to get to bed. The way she was describing it to me still sounded really like really early stages where she’s really anxious about it. Wayne Tan: That anxiety around sleep was starting to build up. I knew it was a something close and dear to her heart because she brought it up in a prayer group. It was something that was concerning her and something that she wanted to get rid of. I taught her what I knew about sleep and trying to restrict her sleep, kind of the regimen that I went through, but then more importantly, it was kind of communicating with her about this relationship that we have with sleep and how really it’s her perception of it has changed. Ultimately, that’s what she has to kind of undo in order to get rid of it. I’m happy to say she’s gone through it and she’s done with it and now she’s sleeping as she normally does in seven, eight hours of sleep. Martin Reed: Wow. Wayne Tan: I think for people who are going through it, I want to say to them you can get through this. Not only that, this is something you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. There are days that I still worry about it, but then all of that relationship that I… And thoughts about sleep that I learned through it helps me get through those nights. It’ll not only help you, but also you can use that to help others get through these difficult times. Martin Reed: The reason why I love all these techniques is because they’re skills based really. We’re learning new skills and once we learn new skills, they’re with us forever. We can always just bring them back out anytime we find ourselves struggling again in the future, but I think you’re the first person I had on who’s told me that not only do you feel good because you’ve got all those techniques in your back pocket, but you’ve also been using them to help other people as well. I think that’s really powerful. That’s really interesting and exciting to hear. Wayne Tan: Yeah. I work with patients and sometimes they’ll talk about their sleep. If I think that it’s something chronic, I always kind of mentioned cognitive behavioral therapy as a potential thing that they could look up and pursue because I really do believe in it. I will have to say in the beginning I was a bit of a skeptic because it’s like, “Well, how much can I really change just because of how I think about something or my behavior towards something?” But the mind is a very, very powerful thing. Martin Reed: Yeah, it really is. Well, one thing I’m curious about, so I’m guessing that some other people listening to this would be curious about too, is how you slept in the end on the night before all those exams. How was your sleep? I’m guessing that your performance was good enough. How did that all go in the end? Wayne Tan: I managed to pass boards. Board certified now, practicing in Philly, doing my residency in Philadelphia. My sleep, it did take a while, I would say, before I’ve finally kind of gone back to what I would say baseline to where I was getting my seven, eight hours of sleep. Maybe sometimes even nine if it’s a lazy day. These days, I am waking up earlier, like around 7:00, and going to bed around 11:00 or 12:00 just because your circadian rhythm is also very, very powerful. Ultimately, these days I can’t help but fall asleep when the certain time comes. Wayne Tan: I think that is something going through it you have to rebuild is your circadian rhythm and resetting it in a way that it works for you and not against you. But I can confidently say that I’m getting all the sleep that I’m satisfied with. I don’t need… I think for maybe about six months I was getting six and a half, six, occasionally seven, but I learned to be satisfied with whatever came. I think that’s very important. Then ultimately when that happens, it all kind of sheds and you get to just go back to being normal once you’re satisfied with what you got. Martin Reed: If you can just clarify the timeline for me, when did you end up taking the board exams? Was it before we were together, when we were working together or was that after we were we were done working together? I’m just trying to remember. Wayne Tan: I started working with you. Then maybe about a month or two, then I took boards. It was a very strange time. My board certification was actually due March of 2020. COVID happened, so all of that got delayed. I had that like four-month period where I really didn’t have anything that I had to do because everything was closed and that probably didn’t help my insomnia because it just allowed me to do nothing, but think about it, think about my insomnia. But yeah, during that time I was getting three or four hours of sleep and some nights not even any sleep. I think by the time I was ready to do boards, I was pretty much at that point where I was comfortable getting six hours of sleep. Martin Reed: Specifically, what was… If you remember, how did you sleep the night before it was exam time? Did you have the best night sleep you’ve ever had? Was it like a miracle or was there a little bit of struggle there? Wayne Tan: It’s not a perfect story. Life events can still affect you. Martin Reed: Absolutely. Wayne Tan: You have to tell yourself that it’s okay that you get a bad night of sleep if you’re going through a something really important and stressful, and that’s okay. It’s absolutely okay for yourself to go through that. That happens. Boards came and I did struggle a little bit, but I used what I knew about sleep and calmed myself down and just reminded myself of all of those sayings about sleep. Ultimately, I was able to fall asleep. I think I fell asleep around 1:30 or 2:00. I was happy and I had no issue with that because I knew I can function with even like three or four hours of sleep because I’ve done that before. I function fine with four or five hours of sleep. Wayne Tan: I learned that only because I went through it. I think if I had taken the same boards without going through all of that, I probably would have still struggled to sleep at night. My mindset with four hours of sleep, probably would’ve been very different than after going through insomnia and going through the whole program. Martin Reed: Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s two really big, important points… Well, maybe even more… that you’ve made there, first and foremost being that we’re always going to have difficult nights from time to time. If you’re looking for the best night’s sleep you’ve ever had every single night of your life, that’s something you’re never going to achieve. We’re human beings. When there’s good stuff about to happen or when there’s difficult stuff about to happen, it’s normal for us to experience sleep disruption. Martin Reed: Second of all, we can still do things even after difficult nights. Even after no sleep whatsoever, we can still actually function. It can feel like we can’t function, we’ve lost all ability to function, but if you are still able to breathe and see and hear, then you are functioning even at a most basic level. It’s definitely not to kind of downplay the effects because they can be really difficult. It can feel as though I just have a complete inability to function, but we can function at some level. Martin Reed: Like you said, if we can give ourselves the opportunity to experience it, how capable we might be able to be, by giving things a try, we might surprise ourselves. I was surprised that you said you got much sleep at all the night before the board exams because I know if it was me in that situation, I probably wouldn’t have got one minute of sleep. But my interpretation of that is different. Because I’m not in that in the throes of the insomnia struggle, I would be like, “Yeah, it sucked. I didn’t get any sleep,” but I’d still go to the exam and I’d still feel reasonably confident that I could perform maybe not 100% of my ability, but probably pretty high up there and still do well. Martin Reed: I’ve had clients that have gone through really long periods of awful sleep and done amazing things like really intense job interviews and still passed them, done really intense boot camps, CrossFit, physical competitions and placed really highly. It’s kind of incredible how capable we can be even after really difficult nights. I think it’s helpful to recognize that we’re always going to have difficult nights from time to time and, second of all, that we can still be quite remarkably capable even after difficult nights too. Wayne Tan: Yeah. Yeah. Martin Reed: All right, Wayne. Well, I really appreciate the time that you’ve given up out of your day to talk to us. I feel like you’ve kind of already touched upon this, but this is a question that I ask every guest, and so I want to ask you to. It’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and feels as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help and that they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Wayne Tan: I would say that there isn’t anything wrong with you, that everybody is capable of sleep and everybody is capable of getting good sleep. With that said, I think it’s important to rule out any health issues that you may have, underlying causes that could cause you to experience insomnia. All things said and all of those things are ruled out and you’re just struggling with it, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It does require you to… I don’t want to use the word effort because it’s not… Effort causes sleep to be harder, but it does require you to kind of change your mind about things in how you view sleep. When I was going through it, it really helped me to hear people finally being cured of insomnia. Wayne Tan: It’s strange now that I’m on this side speaking to somebody who may be going through it, but I made it. I went through it and you can too, you really can, and you don’t have to live with it. You can put it down. You can put down this boulder that you’re carrying. It won’t be instantaneous. It will take time for it to happen, so be gentle with yourself, be kind to yourself and just remember that sleep is not an enemy. It’s your friend. You just have to learn to be reacquainted with sleep because you’ve always known it all your life even as a child. You’ve been friends with sleep. Just treat your time going through it as being reacquainted with this person that you just have a warped view of what. Whatever caused a warpage to happen, that can be undone. Martin Reed: That’s great. Well, I think that’s a really great note to end on, so thank you again for taking time to come on and share your experience, Wayne. Wayne Tan: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Martin Reed: Thanks. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Felicity had struggled with sleep, on and off, for her entire life. Usually, her sleep would get back on track after a few months of sleep disruption — however, when sleep issues returned due to some big life changes, Felicity’s sleep didn’t recover. In an attempt to make sleep happen, Felicity started to spend a lot of time researching sleep. She gave up coffee, she experimented with medication and supplements. She even booked herself into hotels because sleep seemed so impossible in her own bed. Fortunately, Felicity was able to get her sleep back on track and change her mindset about sleep by implementing behaviors that created better conditions for sleep. She practiced self-care and did things that helped her continue to move toward the kind of life she wanted to live, independently of sleep. Felicity did get frustrated with her progress — she felt improvements were not occurring quickly enough. However, because she committed to techniques that help set the stage for sleep and because she was ready, willing, and able to explore her relationship with sleep, Felicity’s sleep did improve. Perhaps most importantly of all, though, Felicity’s entire mindset around sleep changed — she stopped identifying as an insomniac, she started to be kinder to herself whenever difficult nights occurred, and she learned that sleep doesn’t require any effort and doesn’t respond well to effort. Sleep is no longer something that gets in the way of Felicity’s life — she lives her life independently of sleep and, as a result, she is sleeping well and living well. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Felicity. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today. Felicity Jackson: Thanks for having me. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning, as always. Can you just tell us when your problems with sleep first began and if you’ve got any kind of idea what triggered that sleep disruption? Felicity Jackson: Yep. So, I’ve had issues on and off with sleep my whole life. So, I found, on your podcast, there’s two types of people. There’s the people who’ve had a short term event that’s created their insomnia, and then there’s the other people, like me, who’ve struggled with it on and off your entire life. So, I identified with that. Felicity Jackson: I remember as a young kid we had a family holiday house. All the kids slept in the same room, just stare at the ceiling and irritated by little noises. And then, I’ve had, during university exams or moving house or sleeping in hotels, I’ve always struggled a bit with having short term insomnia, but it always recovered itself. Felicity Jackson: In my mid 20s I went through period about three or four months of having insomnia, and that was after my pop passed away and I moved in with my grandma, and it was a hard time for our family. But that passed and I was pretty much, I guess, symptom free, if you wanted to use that word, for about eight or nine years. Felicity Jackson: And then the pandemic hit last year. And I was actually moving to the US in the March of last year, and I was literally ready to go the next day, had sold up, packed up and everything, and then I had to… I had decided not to go because it was so unstable and the situation in the US wasn’t looking good. So, I ended up moving in with my parents, and luckily, my job took me back. Felicity Jackson: I slept absolutely amazingly living with my parents in my old bed, but I wanted a life change. And Australia’s a big country. I was living in Victoria, which is in the south and I thought I can still have a new adventure. And I’d asked work if I could move to Queensland, which is at the top of Australia. It’s got a better climate. We’ve got good beaches and everything. Felicity Jackson: And the way they’ve handled the pandemic here is they’ve shut state borders. So the state, I’m in Queensland now, still has its border shut to half of Australia. So I was waiting until the border opened for Queensland, but I saw the situation was getting worse in my home state and I thought, I’m not getting stuck here any longer. So I packed a suitcase and I literally flew out to Sydney the next day. And over the next 12 weeks I worked out of hotels. I lived in 12 hotels, I think. Felicity Jackson: I was monitoring the situation every single day waiting for the border to open in Queensland. And I didn’t really know where I was going or where I was going to end up, but it came back pretty much straight away when that started. I didn’t let it worry me too much, because I knew that I was in a high stress situation. But then when I settled in Brisbane, which is the city I live in now, I expected it all to go away because a lot of the stress had gone away, but it didn’t go away. It just continued on and on and I was trying to ignore it, and I was… Felicity Jackson: I thought that I was settled, but in reality I was in a new city, I was in a new office. My relocation wasn’t actually approved, so that was a little bit of a thing with work. And then I decided to get on the dating apps. So I was out living my best life drinking and having a good time and pretending I was 25 again, and it wasn’t improving at all. And then consequent things that have happened over the last 12 months were just perpetuating it so bad that that’s when I ended up reaching out to you. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, what were those nights like more recently when you did that relocation and you found that those sleep issues returned and they seemed to be a bit more stubborn this time and not be going away? Was there a typical night? Was there an average night? Felicity Jackson: Yeah. I’ve gone everything from going to sleep instantly and waking up early, to spending hours trying to get to sleep but being able to sleep in but waking up a lot. I’ve gone through the full gamut. But during that time it was that I would go to sleep pretty fast and I would wake up multiple times. Felicity Jackson: So, I was just accumulating sleep debt. And one of the other times I’ve had insomnia in the past I got very depressed because of it. So when I got it this time I was determined not to do that, so I still was out. I never canceled any social things, but it just wasn’t helping. Going to bed at midnight one night and 8:00 PM the next night, obviously, that wasn’t helping either, but it was just those early morning wakenings and just the constant aching of my legs and headaches. Felicity Jackson: Also, I came from a city where it’s like a late night, late morning place, to living here where the suns rises at 4:30 in the morning. So, my normal sleep was I’d go to bed at 11:00 and I’d get up at 7:00. But then here I’m going to bed 11:00 and then I’m waking up at 4:30 and it’s broad daylight. And so I was almost in this jet lag state, and then I can’t get back to sleep when it’s broad daylight. It’s just against your body clock. So, I go to bed at like 8:30 now. So I’ve adjusted, but yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, back before you reached out to me, what kind of things… Were you doing anything? When you moved, you relocated, this insomnia came back, the struggle seemed to happen again. What kind of things did you try to do or to change to try and fix the situation that now you’re able to look back on it, probably weren’t that helpful? Felicity Jackson: So, I gave up coffee, which I loved and still love and also didn’t drink excessively. I would have one in the morning. I was on an endless research project to the point where I was studying brain scans from scientific studies and I was research… And obvious, when you read that having insomnia is going to give you basically every degenerative brain disease there is, that doesn’t help. Felicity Jackson: I would avoid sleeping in my own bed, so I would book hotels a couple of kilometers away from me just so that I didn’t have to sleep in my own bed or I’d go home to see my mom to sleep in that… I call it the magic bed where I had nine hours sleep every night. Oh, what else did I do? Going bed early, going to bed late, and then I tried all the herbs. Felicity Jackson: I tried sleeping pills. So they didn’t… I mean, they don’t work. So every little thing I tried that I mentioned worked briefly, and then it stops working. So the herbal ones, and then I even tried anti-depression medication, even though I don’t have depression. And what I found with that was that rather than having racing thoughts I just had no thoughts, but I still wasn’t getting to sleep. Felicity Jackson: So it was, I just try. Even during my recovery I’ve gone through phases of wanting to sleep in the same bed as my partner, to not wanting to sleep in the same bed as my partner, to just so many different little vices that I tried and they just had this short term or no effect. It’s actually really hard to get sleeping medications and stuff in Australia, so it was a bit of a… you need to have a long term relationship with a doctor, and you need to show that you’re getting therapy and stuff, and I didn’t have that here. Felicity Jackson: So when I moved to Brisbane getting sleeping pills stopped really becoming an option for me, which was probably a positive, because I found that, yeah, I might get seven hours sleep with a sleeping pill, but I’m dealing with this hangover of the pill as well, so I might as well just take the five hours and no pill side effects, than the seven hours where you’re feeling groggy and crap. Martin Reed: Yeah. Exactly. I think it’s quite ironic the way you described those side effects, because often a lot of our concern about sleep is based on how we feel the next day during the day when we’re awake. It just feels really unpleasant. We can feel groggy and maybe confused, that brain fog, and yet at the same… so we reach for a medication or a supplement or something like that that oftentimes can come with those very side effects that we’re taking them for to try and avoid. That’s why they can become such a double edged sword. Felicity Jackson: I used to suffer from really bad jet lag, so I might get somewhere in a really different time zone and it might take me a week of my holiday to recover. And I found that one time I did take sleeping tablets and it was just a game changer. I took them for a couple of nights and I was back. But when you’re on holidays you’re not researching sleep, right? You’re out enjoying yourself and- Martin Reed: Yeah. And just that change of environment as well. We can easily just associate our own beds or our own sleeping environment with that struggle. And so we can feel really sleepy, ready for sleep, and then we go into our bedroom and the brain is like, uh-oh, this is where bad things happen, wakey, wakey time, whereas when we go on vacation or, like you described, go into a different environment, a different hotel room, or go to your parents’ house, sometimes we can sleep. Martin Reed: But I think it’s one of those things that can sometimes be helpful in the short term, but over the longer term it’s one of those things, it worked at first, why is it not working now? And the reason it’s not working over the longer term is because it doesn’t really get to the root of the problem. Felicity Jackson: Yeah. Well, actually, all of my things failing, particularly the hotel one was the most stubborn, because that was something that I was doing a lot, which is quite expensive! Also, because I don’t like any noise or any traffic noise, so I’m like, you have to go five star basically to get that, but during my recovery the more that stuff stopped working, I think, the closer I was to coming good, because I thought… The first night that I couldn’t sleep in a hotel I was like, oh, well, that’s gone now, I might as well persist with my own bed. Martin Reed: Yeah. That’s a great way of looking at it. And I think we’ve opened this discussion really well, because I think a lot of people are going to identify with different aspects of everything you’ve described. A lot of people recognize that they would sleep on and off, have some little patches of sleep difficulties for as long as they can remember, whereas other people don’t. They’re like, this insomnia just strikes. Both are equally normal, so to speak. Martin Reed: But then we get this time where the sleep disruption occurs and, for some reason, it doesn’t disappear, and that’s where we are most likely to get caught up in the struggle. And that’s when we start doing all those things to try and fix the problem, understandably, and they all make sense when we’re doing them. I want to get more sleep, so I’m going to go to bed earlier, for example. Martin Reed: All these things that we do to try and fix the problem, but they backfire on us and they actually perpetuate the problem. That’s like filling up an oxygen tank, putting the mask onto insomnia, putting insomnia into intensive care, and looking after it saying, “Never leave me. Stay with me forever.” That’s the effect it can have. Martin Reed: And so, what we look to do in terms of effective long term solutions is to just address those perpetuating factors, so changing our behaviors in a way that helps create better conditions for sleep and exploring all those thought processes that we have about sleep, our relationship with our thoughts, not necessarily trying to dispute them or to push them away, but just to change the way that we live our lives with the brain broadcasting all those thoughts in the background. Martin Reed: And so, basically, that’s the more theoretical side of it, which you’ve just explained perfectly in practical terms. There was some sleep disruption every now and then, it stuck around, I gave up coffee, I started to book hotels, I did this, I tried supplements, I tried sleeping pills, all those changes, and over the long term they’re not helpful. And then we end up worrying more because all these things we are trying are not proving to be helpful. It just becomes such a vicious cycle, doesn’t it? Felicity Jackson: Yeah, that’s right. And just things like the sleepy time tea, and if you look at the ingredients of that, it’s just like chamomile and something else. And you just, I’m like, that does… I reckon a lot of those things, they help a good sleeper have an even better sleep potentially, even though that might be placebo as well, but when you’ve got chronic insomnia it’s, yeah, they work for a couple of days and then your anxiety gets even worse, because then they’ve stopped working, and then you just think nothing’s going to work. I’m going to be trapped in this hell forever. Martin Reed: Yeah. It is difficult. Although we don’t see sleepy time teas, for example, listed as something we see included in these sleep hygiene rules and rituals, they’re pretty much just another one of those things. Maybe they can be helpful if you’re already sleeping pretty well, you’re just looking for a little bit more optimization or a little bit more relaxation or something like that. But by the time we are dealing with the more entrenched insomnia, the sleepy time tea or supplements or things like that probably aren’t going to make much difference. Martin Reed: And that’s another area where we can get trapped, is adding those rituals, for example, sleepy time tea, but also, taking things away from ourselves that we enjoy. So like, for example, you said you really enjoyed coffee. That was one of the first things you gave up, I’m going to give up the coffee now. Martin Reed: So, it’s probably not going to have any influence on your sleep unless you’re drinking 12 gallons of it a day all the way up until midnight. But what it is doing is it’s training you, well, first of all, we’re taking away something positive from our lives, we’re taking away a plus, and second of all, we’re training ourselves that sleep is having a negative influence on our lives. I’ve got to sleep, because if I don’t sleep now, I’ve taken coffee away, what else am I going to have to take away? I’m going to have to take away going to the gym, or I’m going to have to take away going out with friends. Martin Reed: And before you know it, it’s just completely taken over your life and you’re just sitting in your room not doing anything. And that in itself still doesn’t help. It’s like our brain wants to do a deal with us, do this and you’ll feel better. So you do it. You might feel a little bit better right away, but then over the longer term it’s not really helping you feel any better. Felicity Jackson: Oh, I also got into a really bad habit of the lunchtime nap. And when we went back to the office after the… when they all opened up again, I was on this roster of one week in the office, one week not in the office. And I got to the point where, when I was in the office, I was sneaking home at lunchtime and things like that, and I just thought, oh, this is just not… Felicity Jackson: And then that would increase my anxiety. I’m like, what if my boss notices and I’m not there? I was lying and saying there was a tradesman coming over when there wasn’t, and I was like, this is just not helping the situation at all. And as a 35 year old woman, having a daytime nap’s just not acceptable. Well, I’m not living in Spain and running a late night restaurant having a siesta. Martin Reed: Yeah, it’s interesting that… talking about the naps, they can really be tricky because if we are someone that’s always had these short naps in the day even before we were struggling with insomnia, then maybe we don’t necessarily have to give them up if it’s one of those things that we enjoy. But the reason why we usually suggest trying to resist that urge to nap during the day is because when we nap during the day, if we sleep, we are relieving some of that sleep drive. Martin Reed: So if we just imagine sleep drive is like blowing air into a balloon, every minute of wakefulness we’re blowing air into that balloon, and the idea is when that balloon is really full we go to bed, it bursts, and we sleep. If we nap during the day we are letting air out of that balloon. By the time we go to bed then we got a floppy saggy balloon, probably not going to help with sleep. Martin Reed: But then, if we try to nap because we’ve had some bad nights, going through a bad patch of sleep, not got any sleep, and then we still don’t sleep, then we get even more worried because now I can’t even nap, so what is going on? Felicity Jackson: And you put your focus on the nighttime sleep, you have to get that good sleep, and then you don’t. Martin Reed: Yeah. Exactly. And where we can get tripped up then… I think where I see people with chronic insomnia often getting tripped up in terms of the daytime naps is people with chronic insomnia nap because they want to sleep. They’re desperate for sleep. They want sleep to happen. People without chronic insomnia nap because they’re sleepy. They’re actually finding it hard to stay awake. Martin Reed: And that might sound interesting to say, and people might be listening to this thinking, well, of course I’m sleepy, I’ve got insomnia. But the interesting thing with people with chronic insomnia is, we use this phrase, tired but wired, which has more to do with fatigue. Felicity Jackson: 100%. Martin Reed: So we can be really tired but our brain is wired, it’s keeping us going. And so, conditions aren’t usually right for napping for people with chronic insomnia. Most clients that I work with, when they try to nap, they’re not usually very successful at generating sleep. And I think it comes down to that intent, which is the second part of what I wanted to just quickly touch upon. What is our intent with anything? Martin Reed: When our intent is sleep, whether it’s listening to a relaxation session, if our goal is sleep, if we are napping because we want sleep rather than because we’re sleepy, if we are taking a supplement because the goal is sleep, all these things are unhelpful because they’re sleep efforts and they imply that we can control sleep. We can’t control sleep. We can definitely create better conditions for sleep, but we can’t wave a magic wand and make sleep happen. Nothing can do that. Martin Reed: And whenever we engage in a sleep effort, we’re also telling the mind, okay, I’m trying this, let’s see if it works. And so the mind is always a few notches higher now to see, okay, so tonight we took a melatonin at seven o’clock, we did a sleepy time tea at 7:23, we took a bath, the bath temperature was 98 degrees Fahrenheit, not Celsius, we used this certain brand of smelling salts, let’s see if that’s the secret sauce. And that increases the arousal and often just creates less favorable conditions for sleep. Felicity Jackson: I remember one day I fell asleep on the beach. I was so relaxed, which was extremely rare for that time, and I emailed you and I said, “Oh, I just ruined everything. I fell asleep on the beach.” And you did say, you were like, “Well, if it happened, it just happened.” Felicity Jackson: And I take that now that, say, it’s a Saturday and I’ve got up really early, and I’ve gone to the gym, and I’ve been at the market, and I’ve got something on that night, and I think, oh God, I just love to lie down and relax. Felicity Jackson: And sometimes I do indulge in a bit of a nap like that, but I always make that intention… I always think about what my intention is, and if my intention is to catch up on sleep, then I will not allow myself to have a nap. But if the intention is to just relax and just have a… when I’m actually feeling sleepy, I’ll do it. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think that’s an important distinction to make, right, because when we are in the throes of insomnia we tend to find that a lot of our behaviors are centered on that intention of making sleep happen. And when we get to this point where we can move away from those sleep efforts, that attempt to control sleep, that attempt to make sleep happen, we can definitely start engaging in some more experiments and becoming a little bit more relaxed around it. Martin Reed: As our mindset changes, our behaviors can also change. And, like you said, I think a lot of it does just come down to our intent. And all of these techniques I talk about on the podcast and when I’m working with clients, these aren’t necessarily things that we are looking to be implementing for the rest of our lives. They’re just a way of getting us back on track, being aware of how our behaviors can influence sleep and how our relationship with our thoughts can influence sleep. Martin Reed: Once we’ve got that knowledge under our belt, we typically start to sleep a lot better or feel a bit more comfortable about our sleep. And then we can start, what’s the best term for it, just getting back to not having concern about sleep rule our behaviors. But we’ve always got those skills in our back pockets, so if ever we find ourselves struggling again, we can just pull them back out and just start implementing them again. Felicity Jackson: Yeah. 100%. And you do over and over and over again. Even on a weekly basis you’re pulling out those techniques just to bring you back on track, and just always having that. Felicity Jackson: Another thing you said to me was that you’ve never seen a unique case of insomnia. And I just thought that I found that so helpful that if you could basically see an improvement in everyone, even some of the people you’ve had on your podcast have been suffering within insomnia for like 20 years. And I thought if someone like that can… or, number one, I’m like, how terrible that they didn’t have the treatment options available to them. Felicity Jackson: But also, yeah, if you can help someone who’s had it for 20 years and who’s having multiple nights of no sleep every single week, then it will work for me. And knowing that was really comforting as well. Martin Reed: Yeah. I mean, I think it is comforting because… especially if we are one of, going back to what I was saying earlier, if you’re one of these people that have never struggled with sleep disruption before and then suddenly it just appears out of nowhere and it just seems to stick around, it can be really worrying. You can easily believe that there’s something uniquely wrong, that you are the only person with this issue, but there are many, many people out there going through exactly what you’re going through. Martin Reed: Everyone’s individual circumstances are probably unique, but the behavior of insomnia, how insomnia works, the influence it has, the way it affects our sleep, the way it affects our daytime lives is virtually identical from person to person. And like you said, I’m still waiting to work with a client or to receive an email from someone who tells me something I’ve not heard before, because… Martin Reed: That’s definitely not to belittle what people with insomnia are going through. It is just to reassure that, from person to person, insomnia is pretty much identical. And that means that if insomnia from person to person is identical, these techniques that have helped other people with the same insomnia as you are almost certainly going to help you too. Felicity Jackson: Yeah. Martin Reed: So let’s talk about some of these techniques. So we got a lot of the background stuff out of the way. When we were working together, what kind of, let’s start with the behavioral change side of things, what kind of new behaviors did you implement and find were particularly helpful for you? Felicity Jackson: I found the most helpful technique, and it’s something that I practice now, was the stimulus control. So the getting out of bed. Just to break that stimulus of… or break that association of having a frustration with the bed. And I still probably use this technique every week. If I’m thinking that, oh, I’m feeling anxious and I get out of bed. And it works nine times out of 10 that you go back to bed, or you might have to do it twice, and then you go straight to sleep. Felicity Jackson: So, that was the most helpful, and that was not something that I was doing at all. But then the sleep restriction, I think that helped because I was going to bed at such erratic times. That really helped, even though I was religiously waking up at 4:00 every day annoyingly, but I was going to bed all these different times and just having that rigidity of not having to worry about, am I going to get eight hours, am I going to get nine hours, am I going to get 10 hours, even though getting 10 hours is not something I’d ever done. All of a sudden I was striving to get this 10 hours. Felicity Jackson: And yeah, so probably I’d noticed small changes every week, and this is something we were going to talk about about how I didn’t see instantaneous results, which is what I like. And my personality as well is… and I’ve got friends who are in similar roles to me, so I’m in sales, which is already a stimulating job. You’re doing sales, you’re losing sales. Felicity Jackson: I run a big team of 30 people, and I speak to people with personalities like mine. And so many of them in the corporate world, we’re all the same, this kind of personality that’s like always on. I open my eyes and I’m there and I don’t have any sleep inertia and stuff. Yeah. So probably not having to worry about that timing of going to bed and getting awake and waking up, knowing when I was getting up. Felicity Jackson: That alleviated a bit of the anxiety of it, because I wasn’t striving for sleep anymore. I was just saying, well, I’ll get this much sleep or I won’t, and I’m going to get up and enjoy my day. And yeah, I expected really quick results. I probably just… I saw small incremental improvements every single week. Felicity Jackson: And I was on your forums thinking, why haven’t I had this magic cure that some of your other guests, this is probably just my assumption because you make an extraordinary number of assumptions as well when you have insomnia, is that the program worked in six weeks for some people, I’m five, six weeks in and I’m still… I might have gone from, say, four and a half, five hours to like five hours and 45 minutes or six hours, but I was still… I expected a miracle cure. I wanted fast results. Felicity Jackson: Normally, if I don’t get results in something I just, fail fast, move on, but this was not the technique that I could use. I had to persist. I had to have faith and… Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. It’s funny you said that, because I was working with a client recently, and here’s what I find in my own experience, is the clients that come to me expecting this to take time tend to get results the quickest, the ones who start working with me and they’re quite understandably really keen to get faster results, things to turn around really quickly, they’re the ones that tend to struggle a little bit more and it takes longer for them to get the results. Martin Reed: And I think it just comes down to the effort again. It’s our natural human inclination to put effort into a problem to fix it, but the problem is sleep doesn’t respond well to effort. We cannot control sleep. It’s like with any goal. We cannot make ourselves reach a goal, but we can control our journey toward that goal. Martin Reed: So, I might want to be… When I was a kid, let’s say this, when I was a child I wanted to be a pilot of Concorde, the supersonic jet liner that’s not around anymore. So it turns out I made a good choice abandoning that. But anyway, I had that goal, but I couldn’t make myself become pilot of Concord, but I could go to school, I could join the air cadets as a teenager. There are all these things that I could control towards that journey, but I couldn’t control the actual goal, reaching that goal, that outcome, and it’s like that with sleep and within insomnia. Martin Reed: We can control our behaviors in terms of making sure we’re not spending 10 hours in bed when we are averaging four or five hours of sleep. We can try and go about our days as normally as possible, try and avoid those safety behaviors. We can control all these actions, but we can’t control sleep itself. Martin Reed: So if we can focus all of our attention on the actions, on the process side of things and just leave the outcome to just do what it’s doing, that’s when we tend to get the best results, and actually, ironically, the faster the results, because we are not focused on what we cannot control. We’re more focused on what we can control. Martin Reed: And it does take time though, at the same time. And I think the fact that you’ve identified stimulus control as being one of those really helpful techniques is a good illustration of that, because for people not familiar with the technique, what we often see, as we touched upon right at the start of this episode, was we can learn to associate our beds with unpleasant wakefulness, tossing and turning, anxiety, stress, and worry. And so our brain is like, all right, bed no longer equals sleep, relaxation, coziness, bed equals danger, risk, there’s going to be… It’s almost like when you’re a kid, is there someone hiding under the bed? And you start to freak out. Martin Reed: So what we want to do is just… the good news is that’s learned, right? It’s learned association. So it can be unlearned or we can relearn the original association of bed equals a nice place to be. And we can do that by just doing whatever it takes to make being awake in bed or just being awake at night a bit more pleasant. Martin Reed: And just as it took time to learn that the bed is not a nice place to be, it does take time to relearn that the bed can be a nice place to be. Although, it’s usually not… doesn’t take as long, it still does take time. So I think we do have to have realistic expectations too. Martin Reed: Let’s say you had insomnia for like 10 years, 20 years, you’re probably not going to turn it on its head in four weeks. It’s probably going to take longer. And I have clients that I finish working with them at, say, around eight weeks, there’s been some small improvements, and then I hear back from them in a month’s time or three months later and they’re like, “I kept on going and I got my transformation.” Martin Reed: So, it really can take a long amount of time. And I think if you come into it with the assumption that it will take time, that these changes can be difficult, especially in the short term, and although we can’t control the outcome, we can control the process, I think that can be really helpful. Felicity Jackson: I found that it did get worse at the start in terms of I was getting even less sleep. And even though I knew that I’d discussed that with you and you said that that’s normal, it’s just hard when you’ve got that every day and you are going to work and trying to not cancel on plans or anything. But when you’re just, yeah, getting those headaches and those body aches. Felicity Jackson: And then I ended up taking paracetamol and things like that. And then you wonder if that’s going to erode your liver. And you just got all this constant, even though I don’t think it does if you take two paracetamol a day. It’s just a bit of a myth. But I actually, it was only really about two months ago that I really started to be able to shift from associating a bad night’s sleep with having a sleep disorder, to associating anxiety about sleeping more to things that are going on in my daily life that actually have nothing to do with sleep. Felicity Jackson: And what that brought that on, and it’s just an extension of everything I’d learned from you, was that I did this leadership course, and it was three days. It was two nights staying at this hotel, which I was looking forward to because… This was actually when the hotel vice stopped working for me. And part of the leadership course was on the self-limiting identities. And this could be anything in work, right? This could be, I’m not smart enough, I’m not confident enough, I’m not good looking enough, whatever you are. Felicity Jackson: And I started to think about how I identified so strongly as an insomniac and how that was, I think, holding me back from really being able to move forward properly. And because I couldn’t help myself I ended up researching. I put insomnia identity in Google, and it came up with this study that said that people who had participated in this study had identified as insomniacs. And what this study found was over a third of them didn’t even have insomnia. Medically, they couldn’t even be diagnosed with it. Felicity Jackson: And I thought, oh, I’ve had three bad night’s sleep out of… in a fortnight, I don’t even have insomnia, I’m walking around saying I’m insomniac and I’m actually not. And I had a bad night, really bad night’s sleep that night at the course and I was just going down the spiral again, it’s going to come back, I’m going to go back to that hell, it’s all been for nothing, I’ll never get better, all the other people on the podcast got better, but I won’t. Felicity Jackson: And interestingly, the facilitator of the course, so there were 15 people doing the course, and she said, “Who had a good night’s sleep last night?” In the meantime, I’d just verbal vomited to her about my insomnia that morning. And two people put up their hand, out of 15. Two people had a good night’s sleep. Felicity Jackson: And I looked around, and I go to bed at 8:30, the course went until 9:30. It was talking about your self limiting beliefs and all of this real introspection. And I just looked around and I thought, I’m the only one spiraling out of control here, but I didn’t have a worse night than anyone else here. And they were just looking at it as a one off event. I had a bad night’s sleep last night, how shit, whereas I’m like, oh, I’m just going down this spiral of these negative thoughts. And after that I started to think that… Felicity Jackson: So I’ve just moved house a couple of weeks ago, and there were a couple of nights where I thought I’m not going to have a good night’s sleep, but I was able to say, well, you’ve just moved house, you’ve just moved in with your partner, I’m sleeping in a bed with him every night now, I’m sleep in a different bed, we’re still settling in, there’s boxes everywhere, yeah, you might have a bad night’s sleep, you probably will, but it’ll pass, just like it has the other times. Felicity Jackson: And even if it does, yeah, it’s not a permanent thing. And now that I’ve had that mental thing that I’d actually don’t… I’ve recovered from my sleep disorder, I can really disassociate that from any anxieties that I’d be feeling in the day. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think that’s a really interesting topic, how the role of insomnia identity plays into everything. There was a study that I recently read and it found that people that identified as insomniacs, that in itself was more predictive of what we call daytime impairment, more difficult days, than poor sleep was. So, just to repeat that, just having that insomnia identity was more predictive of daytime impairment than how you sleep. Martin Reed: So, I think there’s definitely something to having this identity, which we naturally as human beings, we’re going to form that identity, especially when we’ve had insomnia for long periods of time. But that means that it’s like this lower hanging fruit that maybe if we can tackle that and give ourselves a new more helpful, more constructive identity, that that can be helpful. Felicity Jackson: I kind of think of it as a bit like, say if you’ve had a history of a bad depression and you have one bad day where you had a shitty day, you think, oh, my depression’s coming back, whereas with me I’m like, I had a bad day, I’m going to get a pizza, I’m going to get some chocolate, I’m going to watch Netflix and think about my… drown my sorrows in this ice cream and tomorrow I’ll have a great day. I don’t think of it as anything that’s going to stick around. Felicity Jackson: And I’m trying to think about that a bit like looking at insomnia like that. Yeah, I had a bad night’s sleep. It was just a bad night’s sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. And that’s the thing. I think, especially if we can remember a time in our past when we had some sleep disruption and it didn’t really affect us but all of a sudden now it is, often it does come down to our interpretation of what it means to have those difficult nights. Martin Reed: Back in the past maybe insomnia didn’t stick around because, precisely because we didn’t really pay much attention to having some difficult nights. But of course, we’re all human, when those difficult nights stick around, then we are going to start to get a bit more worried about them, and then that can feed into that negative cycle. Martin Reed: But really all these thoughts mean… I think we need to recognize that all these thoughts, whether they’re constructive or not, they’re all just our minds looking out for us. So when the mind’s like, if you don’t sleep tomorrow will be awful, you might lose your job, you’re going to get fired, you’re never going to make it through your day, you’re going to be a bad mom, you’re going to be a bad teacher, whatever. These are all our brain looking out for us, being… Martin Reed: It’s like having that really over enthusiastic really intense friend that’s just always calling you up, “How are you doing? How are you doing? How do you feel about that?”, just over and over. And our minds are like that. Our mind is trying so hard to give us the best life possible that it’s actually getting in our way. So we can’t control those thoughts because our brain is always going to want to look out for us. None of us will be alive today if it wasn’t for our brains wanting to look out for us. Martin Reed: But where we can make a difference is how we respond to those thoughts. Do we let those thoughts take over all of our actions and all our behaviors and move us away from the life we want to live, or do we recognize those thoughts as thanks, Brian, you’re looking out for me, doesn’t make me feel good but I realize you’re looking out for me, taking a step back, maybe you’re taking a moment, and then deciding how to respond. Martin Reed: Are you going to respond in a way that moves you away from your values, now I’m going to cancel that night out with friends, or are you going to still go out with friends, live according to your values, even with that megaphone in the background, your brain, looking out for you? Felicity Jackson: Yeah. There was one podcast you did, Celia, and she really kind of… I resonated with her, and she was someone who’d had sleep issues her whole life. Felicity Jackson: And she said a couple of things that really resonate with me. The first one was that her husband says to her that things are so much better than they used to be. And I think about that all the time when I’m like, oh, I’ve had a couple of bad nights, which is fewer and far between now. I always think that it’s so much better than it used to be. And the second one she said was that she had an obsession with being cured. So, I mean, this program is going to cure me, and once I let go of that… Felicity Jackson: It was funny that day that you released the podcast with Celia because I’d had quite a bad run of a couple of nights, and then I woke up and I looked at my phone and I think you’d sent an email saying that there was a new podcast and with Celia and I thought, I’ll listen to that. Felicity Jackson: And, yeah, just so many of the things she said was just… it was just like that serendipitous timing where… But the obsession with being cured, I let go of that because I thought, I’ve had this for so many times, or I’ve memories of this sleeping stuff since I was about eight years old, I’m never going to be cured, it’ll probably come back at some point or even in a short term capacity. But I think the way that I react to it is going to determine whether it sticks around for a couple of days or a couple of months. Martin Reed: Yeah. Exactly. What I really liked when I was talking to Celia was she just completely changed her mindset and she was just like, look, there is no cure. She just changed her mindset so that, look, there’s no cure. And what I liked about that was, I think she had framed it in a way that was like, look, there’s no cure to sleep disruption from time to time, it’s going to affect… it affects every human being on the planet, it’s going to affect me from time to time. Martin Reed: There’s no cure for that. We cannot eliminate every single potential trigger for sleep disruption. There’s probably like 10 billion of them, probably more. We can’t live our lives trying to eliminate all those potential triggers, but what we can do is make sure that we are not going to feed them, we’re not going to be that oxygen tank for the insomnia to stick around for longer than it needs to. Martin Reed: And we can also do things, no matter how small. Even if we’re really struggling, no matter how small, we can take tiny baby steps towards living the kind of life we want to live, even when we have difficult nights, even over really sustained period of times. There are still tiny teeny things that we can do that give the middle finger to insomnia and say that, hey, even though you’re doing this to me, I can still do this for myself. And I think that is a big mindset change that can be helpful. Felicity Jackson: Yeah. And I think if I’m going to have a job where for nine hours a day it’s full on, full on, full on and not stimulating, then I need to balance that out with other… and I think that’s where I haven’t done that in the past necessarily. And so, I look at it more as self care. I don’t look at it as things to stop the insomnia coming back. I just look at it as, well, I need to look after myself and, otherwise, I should get a more stress free job, even though I don’t know where that exists, but… And then, if I get a different job because of my insomnia, then we’re just back at square on that. Martin Reed: Right. Felicity Jackson: Letting it rule your life again. Martin Reed: Yeah. It can be really easy to end up getting caught up in that trap again, right, because it’s so easy to just suddenly be like… Well, I think what it is is because our brain is just so keen to look out for us. It’s always going to have those statements to give us like, oh, maybe if you stay home tonight, you’re feeling pretty stressed, stay home tonight, you’ll feel better and maybe you’ll sleep great, and it’s really easy to… Sometimes those thoughts can be really helpful when we listen to them and implement what our brain is telling us, but sometimes they can’t. Martin Reed: So it’s definitely a balancing activity. It can be tricky. And one of the things I see in clients that have really made that transformational change is they’re just less, what’s the phrase used, less reactive to the thoughts, better able to recognize that all these thoughts going on in the mind are thoughts and that we always get to choose how we want to react to them. Martin Reed: And we can react in a way that’s, going back to values, because I think it’s easy to illustrate, we can react in a way that’s not really aligned with our values or we can react in a way that is aligned with our values, even though our mind might be telling us not to go in that direction. Yeah. Felicity Jackson: Yeah. Definitely. Martin Reed: One thing that I do just quickly want to just circle back on, because I know it’s something that you were also keen to talk about, was just how this process can take time, that it is a journey. We’re never going to change. We can definitely change our behaviors overnight, but we’re probably not going to get results overnight, but changing our mindset, that definitely usually takes a lot longer. Martin Reed: Can you just tell us a little bit more about what that process was like for you? I think you touched upon earlier that it was… you were seeing these incremental improvements over months and months, but it’s only now more recently that you feel you’ve really hit that real turning point. Felicity Jackson: So we started, I mean, I first reached out to you about 12 months ago, and I started the program. And we both decided that I should stop and wait until I was really ready to do it, because I was trying to do sleep diary but I was in the midst of my little dating experiment, and I had a lot of social things on that I was… Felicity Jackson: In that 12 weeks that I was moving up to Queensland, I was on my own nearly the whole time, and that was just… it’s not healthy as a human to be like that. But particularly as an extroverted person, it took a bit of a toll on me. And then when I got to Brisbane, I was just taking every social invitation. I was so excited to be there. Felicity Jackson: And so, that was when I was going to bed at 11:00 and then 8:00 and then I just couldn’t commit to it, and we decided that I would pause it. And then I picked it up at the end of January, and this was just a better time for me. It was much more calm. I’d settled in to where I was. There wasn’t all the Christmas social activities going on. And so, I could commit to the program fully then. Felicity Jackson: So I think that’s a really important part of just making sure that you’re ready to do it and that you’ve 100% committed, otherwise, it won’t work. But yeah, it was just such slow changes that just required so much persistence just to keep having faith that I would get results if I continued along the path. And yeah. Felicity Jackson: I actually did break the deal and do a little bit of research on recovery, insomnia recovery. And that also helped me as well, because it really said that you’re not really expected to have full confidence until probably six plus months after you’ve done a period of, I guess, cognitive behavioral therapy and the sleep restriction. Felicity Jackson: And I think that really helped me as well, because I thought, oh, I am tracking to a timeline of the recovery that I was just expecting to be cured within the eight week program, and having a bit of a… I ended up having a video call with you probably in June-ish, and that got me back on track as well, but I also got a promotion during that time, just to add another layer of stress, and a new relationship. Felicity Jackson: And I got to the point where I’d reached the level of my stress, and I took a couple of weeks off work. I took three weeks off work, and that was just a huge benefit as well. I took it as leave, and that just allowed me to take one stimulating thing out of my life and get my stress levels down. And that really helped as well, because it was just… it was an uphill battle trying to control my insomnia when… or not control my insomnia. It’s a terrible way to put it. But to focus on my recovery from the chronic insomnia while having so many external stimulating things coming at me still, and I think just having those couple weeks off. Felicity Jackson: But I know that that’s not possible for everyone, but I took it as like, I’m going to have a holiday, I’m just going to do some things for myself and relax. And, as a result of that, the first couple of days got even worse, just like, I was still in the research projects and everything. But then I started to exercise again, which is another thing I’d given up. I started to exercise again. And I started to just do more calming things like having a few massages and stuff. And that got my stress levels down to a point where I could go back to getting up at the same time every day. And that really helped as well. Felicity Jackson: It’s still a work in progress, but I’ve just moved and I haven’t had really any bad… I’ve had a couple of slightly shorter sleeps, but I’m getting around the seven, eight hour sleep now. I had a couple of six night hours sleep, but… And I need that seven, seven and a half to feel rested. I’m not one of these lucky people who can sustain themselves on five hour sleep, but I haven’t had any of those periods where it just goes to having four hours then three hours then none and the spiraling despair. Felicity Jackson: It’s kind of, I’ve been able to bounce back, and I really just focused on that. Well, I’m still a little bit shaky about my confidence with sleep, but it’ll only get… Yeah. As Celia said, things are so much better than they used to be, and that’s what you just have to keep thinking and yeah. Felicity Jackson: I came across the techniques that you teach initially, because I started seeing a sleep psychologist here, and I ended up going with your program because he became progressively… the ability to talk to you every day, that was huge for me, just being able to say, “Oh, my sleep schedule is until 5:30, but what if I wake up at 10 past five, should I stay in bed another 20 minutes or should I get up, or what if I do this, or what if I do that?” Felicity Jackson: That was so good, just to have that constant support, because what I found with my sleep psychologist, and this is just a wonderful thing about the pandemic, is that he became so busy because there was such a big increase in insomnia during the pandemic that I couldn’t… I used to be able to get in with him once a week, and it got to the point where I couldn’t get in to see him for five weeks at a time, and it’s just not enough. It wasn’t enough support. And he even told me that it’s got a phrase, coronasomnia. And it’s just like an epidemic now. Martin Reed:Yeah. So much good stuff there. I think what I liked was making sure that if you’re ready to make some changes, to create these better conditions for sleep, it’s important to recognize that some changes are going to need to be made, right, and sometimes life… we might not be ready for that, whether life is really hectic for us right now if we relocate and we’re just starting a new job or something like that, maybe now isn’t the right time. Martin Reed: So, choosing a time that’s appropriate to start, but also recognizing there’s probably never any perfect time. It’s kind of like choosing when to have of kids. If you’re someone that wants to have kids and you’re waiting for the perfect time, that perfect time is probably never going to turn up. But recognizing that it does require change, so am I in a place right now where I’m ready to make those changes and really commit to doing something new, something different? Martin Reed: And then taking time off work. I think that’s one of these potential double edged sword things, right? And I think it worked really well for you because you used it as a time to do good stuff. So you started to get back into doing all the stuff that was aligned with your values, that made you feel good. You didn’t spend all of that time just lying in bed, I need to sleep, I need to sleep. Felicity Jackson: No. Martin Reed: I need to sleep. Felicity Jackson: None of that. Martin Reed: And that’s a trap we can fall into. We think, oh, take a couple of weeks off work, then what normally happens is we just have a whole day of nothingness ahead of us. And when we got nothing to do we’re going to be probably less productive. The megaphone in our brain gets a bit louder because there’s nothing else for us to be focused on. So that could be a bit of a double edged sword, but it worked for you, like I said, because you filled it with your values, filled it with good stuff- Felicity Jackson: And my- Martin Reed: … some- Felicity Jackson: … partner- Martin Reed: … self care. Felicity Jackson: … he actually lost his job, well, he finished up at his job because he was starting to study full time. So, it ended up that we had this time off together, which we’d never really had. So we could do things together as well that, obviously, he’s not going to lie in bed all day. So that took that focus off, that we ended up going on a road trip and… Martin Reed: Nice. Yeah. So like you were- Felicity Jackson: It was fun. Martin Reed: … using that time to basically live life, right, which is way more important than sleep at the end of the day. When we’re really old and we are looking back in our lives we’re probably not going to be thinking of all the great sleep we had. We’re going to be thinking of all the great things we did when we were awake. Martin Reed: And just the final thing you touched upon was this whole new label that we’ve got of coronasomnia or whatever they’re calling it these days. I think we just have to recognize that anytime something stressful happens we’re probably going to go through a period of sleep disruption, and dealing with this pandemic is just another one of those things. Martin Reed: But we see it in the media and stuff, everyone likes to put a label onto something and then share all this information that probably ends up just freaking us out even more about sleep and that isn’t usually helpful, but it just proves, again, that if you want to call it coronasomnia or insomnia or anything else, it’s all the same thing, because from person to person, insomnia is the same. It really doesn’t matter what label we put on it. Felicity Jackson: Yeah. Yep. And where I am now we’ve been… just by some miracle, have had barely any COVID-19 here, and the way they’ve dealt with it is if they had one… I mean, they’re relaxed a bit now, thank God, but even if they had one case they lock everything down, tell you to go home. So you’re going in the office, then I’m not going in the office, then I’m being sent home from the office, then I’m working, then you’re not even allowed to have your partner over, then you can have your partner over. Felicity Jackson: And it’s also created a divide between… so I’ve got a team around Australia, and you’ve got people hit hard by it, and then you’ve got people, like in state I’m in, living your life like it’s normal. And so it’s created this real divide as well which has had to be managed. You’re managing not only your own kind of uncertainty, but all these other people who look to you for their support as well. Martin Reed: Yeah. You know what I think it comes down to, it just comes down to the fact that life is difficult, and life comes with pain, and it’s just a fact of life. And where we can get really tripped up is when we try and just eliminate the pain and eliminate difficult thoughts, difficult emotions and feelings. When we make that our focus, that’s when we can really get caught up in the struggle. Martin Reed: If we can move away from that, trying to eliminate all this potential painful thoughts and memories and feelings and emotions more towards our actions, just doing stuff that’s meaningful to us, then that has… usually has a far better outcome because we’re focused on what we have control over. And we can always control our actions no matter how difficult the circumstances we find ourselves in. But at the same time, we do need to recognize that life is difficult. Martin Reed: We have to make some time for some self care too. Life isn’t easy. There are difficult times. And many of us are really good at being compassionate when friends are going through difficulties, but when we are going through difficulties we tend to tell ourselves off, you shouldn’t be feeling this way, you’re a failure, you should be doing this, you should be feeling- Felicity Jackson: What’s wrong- Martin Reed: … that. Felicity Jackson: … with me? Martin Reed: Yeah. Sometimes we need to turn this around and just imagine ourselves as our best friend, or what would I tell my best friend in this situation, what would I say to them? And sometimes just that in itself, giving ourselves that little bit of self-care can be helpful too. Felicity Jackson: And when I went to the doctor and I said, “Oh, I’ve got insomnia.” Felicity Jackson: And they say, “What’s your life been like lately?” Felicity Jackson: And I’m like, “Well, in the last 18 months I’ve lived in five houses, 22 hotels. I’ve moved states. I’ve had a new relationship, a new job.” Felicity Jackson: And they’re just like, “There’s nothing wrong with you. Go for a run.” I’ve had three doctors tell me to go for a run. “There’s nothing wrong with you.” is what they will say. I might just start believing it. Martin Reed: Yeah. When we’ve got that much on our plate I think it’s understandable to go through some sleep disruption. Not really much we can do about that, as I think your doctor’s, probably not with much compassion, shared with you. But it’s when we have adjusted to all these stresses or they’re no longer relevant and the insomnia’s sticking around, that’s when we can start to explore ways that we can create better conditions for sleep. Martin Reed: But, like you said, there’s always going to be times of sleep disruption. There is no magic cure. There’s no way of eliminating every trigger for sleep disruption. Living with some difficult nights from time to time is part of being a human being, but that doesn’t mean that we have to live with insomnia every night for the rest of our lives. There are definitely things that we can do to create those better conditions for sleep and to live the kind of life we want to live independently of sleep, and even perhaps in the presence of all those difficult thoughts and emotions that come along for the ride. Felicity Jackson: Well, one of the doctors I saw, he was an older German man, and he said to me in a heavy German accent, that, “The only thing wrong with you is that you don’t have your shit together.” Martin Reed: And so- Felicity Jackson: And so- Martin Reed: … did that- Felicity Jackson: … I just thought- Martin Reed: … transform everything for you? Was that a big insight and changed your life? Felicity Jackson: Well, he had a packet of cigarettes in his pocket, so I didn’t take too much notice of what he said. Martin Reed: Yeah. It’s difficult, isn’t it? Because it’s like when someone tells you, “Oh, cheer up.”, or, “Come on, don’t feel sad, don’t be angry, relax.” When we’re told how to feel or we’re told how we should be feeling, it’s never helpful. Felicity Jackson: Or you feel like punching someone in the face who says, “Have you tried melatonin?, or, “Have you tried listening to a meditation?” It’s like, yes, I’ve tried listening to a… Don’t tell someone with chronic insomnia that they should maybe have a warm bath and go to bed early. It’s just not helpful. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. You’re right. I think a lot of this stuff probably comes from the right place, from someone wanting to help, but I think everyone listening to this is going to know these things aren’t helpful. This is probably one of the things that someone listening to this is is going to come away and not end up researching, because they already know that bubble bath isn’t going to help, melatonin probably not helpful. Martin Reed: What is helpful is just making some behavioral changes to create those better conditions for sleep and just exploring the relationship we have with our thoughts, not trying to necessarily push them away and fight them, but maybe making a bit of space for them, and then making that decision to live the kind of life we want to live, even when they’re present. Martin Reed: So Felicity, I know I’ve taken a lot of your time, and I really appreciate it, but I would just like to ask you one final question, because I ask every guest it, and I would feel bad for you if I didn’t ask you the question too. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening, they feel like they’ve tried everything, they’re beyond help, they can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Felicity Jackson: I would say that the natural techniques is the gold standard for treatment, that persistence pays off, and that you probably won’t get fast results if you’ve had… If you’ve got the predisposition you might not get the fast results, but if you persist with the techniques and reach out to you for support, Martin, then, just like every other case you’ve worked with, you should see a significant improvement and maybe not a cure, probably not a cure. But, yeah, I mean, if you’re watching these podcasts, you’re probably not in the greatest shape and it’s worth a try. That’s what I would say. Hang in there. Martin Reed: Great. I love it. Well, thank you so much again for taking the time to come out on the podcast today. Felicity, I know that- Felicity Jackson: No problem. Martin Reed: … this conversation is going to help a lot of people. Lots of people are going to identify with everything we’ve talked about. So, again, thank you. Felicity Jackson: No worries. Thanks, Martin. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. Mentioned in this episode: Podcast episode with Celia Research study on insomnia identity and reported daytime impairment I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Night after night of wakefulness led Amy to a dark place where she saw no way out. She felt helpless and doomed to a life of insomnia. Ironically, Amy became friends with someone else who was struggling with insomnia. This friend ended up enrolling as a client of mine and started to experience improvements in their sleep. Amy learned more about the behavioral changes he was making, and — even though she assumed these wouldn’t work for her — she figured she was already suffering so much, nothing she could do could make her situation worse. So, Amy started to spend less time in bed, she abandoned her sleep rituals, and she shifted away from trying to control sleep and all the thoughts and worries her mind would generate. After weeks of ups and downs, Amy started to get more sleep, more consistently. Now, she averages around seven or more hours of sleep each night and considers her transformation nothing short of a miracle. Amy’s story shows that no matter how desperate things feel, no matter how severe your insomnia may be, there is always hope. If you are willing and able to make some changes to your current sleep habits and your current relationship with the difficult thoughts and emotions that like to accompany insomnia, you can get to a place where you will realize that you CAN sleep! Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that by changing how we respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it, we can move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life we want to live. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Amy. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Amy M: You’re welcome. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation. So without any further ado, maybe we could just start right at the beginning and talk about when your sleep issues first began. When did they first begin, and what do you think caused those initial issues with sleep? Amy M: So they began first in September of 2020, and I think the first thing that really happened is that we had raccoons in the attic, and that was causing some interrupted sleep. But it began, in earnest, when I was talking to a friend of mine and he mentioned that he was having sleep issues. And because I had had insomnia once before in 2013, I was very superstitious about talking about sleep. And when he told me what was happening, I suddenly got scared like, “Oh my God.” And I just suddenly knew I wasn’t going to sleep that night, just because of him telling me that his… It triggered something, and that’s when it really started. Martin Reed: I hear you mentioned the word superstition around insomnia. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Amy M: Yeah, well since I had the insomnia in 2013, and I had resolved it finally, but it was really difficult to resolve. Since then I’d always felt, well, superstitious. Once I was sleeping again from that first one, I mentally didn’t want to get anywhere near the idea of not sleeping again. So that’s what I meant by superstitious. So I knew that if I started to think about that much, that there was a danger of it happening. And then when it did come up with him, since he was a close friend and I often empathized with him, it just triggered this thing that set that off again. Martin Reed: It almost sounds as though you had this completely understandable desire to just not even want to think about sleep. Anytime those sleep related thoughts or thoughts related to insomnia pushed into your head, you want to try and push them out. And you would really be conscious about trying to avoid any situation or circumstance whereby you might even start to think about sleep or insomnia. Does that sound about right? Amy M: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Martin Reed: I think a lot of people are going to identify with that, because I think it can be quite helpful in the short-term, just to try and avoid any situation or circumstance where we think or talk about sleep or insomnia. But as you discovered over the longer term, it can be really hard to control our life or control our thoughts in that way, because our brain is always going to want to think things, and it becomes really difficult to sustain that thought suppression or that experience suppression. Amy M: Yeah. And there was more to why the actual insomnia began than just getting that thing from my friend. But then you’re also bringing up the whole idea about thoughts and controlling your thoughts. And having done a lot of meditation and been on a spiritual path for a long time, I had a lot of experience with trying to stop my thoughts and control my thoughts, and come to a deeper place of no thinking. But that’s getting a little bit ahead of myself and the whole story of how this began. So the other stuff that was happening is that, for certain things had not gone the way I had wanted them to. And I was… I don’t know what, settling into a new situation at this time last fall. Amy M: And then I started getting fear. And once the fear started happening, I had gotten this whole relationship with the fear and trying to not go into the fear, and then being encouraged by a teacher to just let myself experience the fear. And then these other things were happening where I have some properties, and I suddenly had to get them all inspected, get them repaired, pass inspection. And then by that time, I had started to not sleep, so it was that… Once you start not sleeping, you get into this whole downward spiral, where it becomes really difficult to feel positive. I’m sure people watching will identify. It just wrecks your life completely. And I found myself feeling incapable of doing things that ordinarily I could do without any problem. So everything just went down into a negative vicious circle. Martin Reed: Yeah, definitely. I think that was a big insight that you just touched upon, where you said that there was a teacher that you were working with, and they said maybe instead of trying to avoid or to fight or to run from these difficult or uncomfortable thoughts and emotions such as fear, maybe if we can get to a place where we’re more willing to experience those emotions or those thoughts or those feelings. It can sometimes be a bit more helpful, because often where we get caught up is in that struggle, that completely understandable desire to avoid uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, and emotions. And that’s where we can get a little bit trapped sometimes. Amy M: Yeah. Well, I have a lot of experience in my prior life of just going into emotion and experiencing emotion, and just coming out the other side. The problem with this was that, when I would attempt to go to sleep, that would all surface and then I would have this long, long stretch of time through the entire night, of going into it and coming out of it and having it surface again, and all of this stuff. Martin Reed: Yeah. Amy M: Yeah. Martin Reed: I think a lot of us can probably recognize that when there’s some strange or unusual or stressful or difficult periods of our life… You mentioned having raccoons in the attic, or having all those issues with houses, you’ve got to get through inspection, lots of stress. We’re going to probably experience some temporary sleep disruption, just as a normal human response. And normally our sleep gets back on track when we’ve adjusted or these issues are no longer as relevant. But in chronic insomnia and other longer-term struggle with sleep, we often see that even when those initial triggers are no longer present, the sleep issues remain. Amy M: Yeah, that’s what happened to me, because I did eventually get everything inspected and passed inspection, got the licenses, and I thought that it would be over then, but unfortunately it wasn’t. And then also in the middle of getting through… This was in December by then, getting everything finished, I developed a physical issue. So that physical issue then started to become another source of fear, because I had no idea what it was, how to treat it, what to do about it. So once the first issue was okay, then it just glommed onto the next thing. Martin Reed: If we were able to eliminate any triggers for sleep disruption or recurring or fresh triggers for sleep disruption, why do you feel like those sleep issues stuck around, even when those initial triggers were no longer an issue? Do you think it was more related to maybe your past experience struggling with sleep, or just the thought processes, your relationship with sleep, or those sleep related thoughts, worries, and ideas, maybe they were contributing to this ongoing disruption with sleep? Amy M: I think there were two things. I think one is that I adjusted to living without hardly any sleep. And at this point I think I was getting maybe two hours a night. Initially I had the type where I’d fall asleep for two hours, and then I’d wake up and be unable to sleep after that. But then it would also start careening into no sleep at all, just this form of resting. So I think I got acclimated to not sleeping, and I felt as if I had worked my way into this just dark place of living without sleep and struggling. And it seemed as if I had forgotten how to sleep. Actually, I was quite sure that I was not ever going to find my way out of this again, that I completely forgotten how to do it. And I didn’t really have any hope that I would again. So I think it had become that habit thing. Yeah. Martin Reed: I think that’s a common thing I hear from people, is this concern or this worry or this belief that, “I think I’ve just forgotten how to sleep, or I’ve lost the ability to sleep.” And that as a statement in itself can be quite scary, quite worrying, quite concerning. And then of course, that can feed into this heightened arousal, that can then create some ongoing sleep disruption. Amy M: Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t really just disruption, it was just night after night of not sleeping. It wasn’t like I’d sleep and I’d wake up, I’d sleep, I’d wake up, it was just lying there just for countless hours without sleeping. And I got into this thing where I was thinking, “Well, okay. I’m not sleeping, but I’m resting. And let me just try to settle into as internally quiet a place as I can, and just lie here and rest. If I can’t sleep, at least I’ll rest.” I did some research and realized that actually really was not a substitute for sleep, but I felt as if it was better than nothing. So I would be in bed for these long periods of time, just lying there, just resting. Yeah. And then also sometimes I would find myself having to do that during the day as well, because I was so tired all the time. Martin Reed: Right. I think a lot of people listening to this are going to identify with you there, because a common hallmark, a common thing that we see among people with chronic insomnia, is spending a lot of time, usually in bed, but just a lot of time resting, allotting a lot of time for sleep. Resting during the day, being more sedentary during the day, because after difficult night, after difficult night, after nights of no sleep or very little sleep, our brain is screaming at us to conserve energy, “You’re exhausted, you’re worn out.” But unfortunately the way this fatigue works is the more sedentary we are, often the more heightened that sense of fatigue can be. And often, of course when we are sedentary, we’re not really doing anything else, because by its very nature we’re sedentary. So the mind has nothing really to focus on apart from this ongoing thinking and worrying about sleep, which can again feed into those ongoing sleep difficulties. Amy M: I just got into this really dark place where I was lying there contemplating my character, thinking all kinds of negative things about myself, it was go into all of that. And then there was… I tried sleep medications initially and they didn’t work at all. Really, it didn’t help much. And I was given another one and I had an allergic reaction to it. And that was probably the lowest point, because I got this rash all over my body, it was causing my nerves to do all this jangly stuff through the night. I couldn’t even lie there comfortably. Amy M: So I think that was probably the absolute low. And of course depression comes on during all of this too, and really bad thoughts. Thinking back on it now, I mean, it doesn’t really make any sense logically, but this is… I mean you just lose this ability to live constructively. I think that the psychological aspect of it is really, really important. Martin Reed: Yeah. I completely agree with you. And I can just tell this shift in the mindset of you describing the back then and the way you’re reflecting on it now, you can just tell that your mindset has changed. You can think, “Well, on reflection now I’m beyond this.” This way of thinking doesn’t seem quite so logical as it maybe did back then. Amy M: I just wasn’t able to get to a more rational place. And I tried all sorts of things. But I did eventually get help with that. That help came first. It didn’t help get me rational, but it helped me to contend with this darker aspect that had become really, really strong, predominant in my life. My waking life as well as my lying there at night resting life. I can’t call it my sleeping life, because it wasn’t sleep. Just horrible. It’s just horrible. Martin Reed: Yeah. It really is. It really is very, very difficult, very challenging. And this is why I like to have these discussions with guests like yourself, because it shows that there is a way out, even when you feel like you’re really deep in this struggle with sleep and with insomnia. It is possible to come out the other side of it, no matter how hopeless you feel the situation might be at the present time. Amy M: Yeah. Even if you don’t believe it. And I didn’t believe it either. I mean, I kept trying things, but yeah, I thought that was it. Martin Reed: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that. Because you mentioned that there were a few things you tried, that you’d increase the amount of time you’d spend resting. You tried the route of medications, supplements, things like that. What other things had you tried, that looking back on it, were probably not that helpful? Amy M: Sleep hygiene. And it’s funny too, because the sleep hygiene thing, I mean, it logically made sense, but it didn’t really do anything. And it was only when I heard you in a little discussion group saying that, that it didn’t actually really help. I listened to that a couple of times and I realized like, “Oh, wait. It really isn’t doing anything. Wow.” Martin Reed: One reason I think that these sleep hygiene techniques can be a bit of a trap, a bit of a difficulty for people with insomnia, is they just add a ton more rituals to our routine. Now we have all these things that we might feel obligated we need to do. And it almost becomes a full-time job just preparing for sleep, which is what the opposite of what sleep really should be. It should be effortless. And because sleep hygiene isn’t really effective for people with chronic insomnia, not only are we adding all these rituals, but then when they don’t work or we don’t actually find them all that helpful, we can then start to worry that something is uniquely wrong, that, “Oh my goodness, even sleep hygiene isn’t working. I must have some unique strain of insomnia. There really is no hope for me.” Martin Reed: As a standalone treatment, if someone has chronic insomnia and the only thing they try is sleep hygiene, we would probably expect that person not to notice much improvement in their sleep, because sleep hygiene is more of a preventative measure. I like to associate it with brushing your teeth. It’s great to brush your teeth, but once you’ve got that cavity, doesn’t matter how often you brush your teeth, that cavity is not going to get fixed. You need something different. Amy M: Yeah, that’s really true. I kept it up anyway, even though it wasn’t helpful. Yeah, I had a lot of rituals too, that really didn’t end up doing any good. I would do yoga, I would meditate, sometimes I would try meditating in the middle of the night. I mean, that might have the effect of bringing me… I don’t know what the word is, but more relaxed. I mean, the really funny thing about the whole thing is that, I could get to a place of not thinking, but I couldn’t turn my awareness off. I couldn’t turn my consciousness off in order to sleep. That was what made me think this was it, there was no way out of this. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think it’s great that you mentioned that, because I think a lot of people are going to identify with that, because often our ongoing quest is to figure out how to flip that switch, how to turn our consciousness off or how to press on for sleep to happen. And often it’s that desire or our attempts to make that happen, that’s where we can get caught up. Because if we just go out on the street and ask someone who sleeps well what they do to make sleep happen, you probably get that blank stare. And it’s the very fact that they don’t do anything, they make no attempt to make unconsciousness happen or to make sleep happen, they just go to bed. They don’t do anything, and sleep happens. It’s when we try and completely understandably get involved in that process, that it can become the real root of the problem. Amy M: Yeah, you’re right. Trying makes it worse, actually. Martin Reed: Yeah. So as I understand it, you had a friend of yours who was also struggling with sleep, and you ended up using each other as a support system. Can you tell us a little bit more about? Amy M: Yeah, yeah, I can. So I just happened to be in a conversation with someone who mentioned that they had insomnia, and I didn’t know them at the time. So I just reached out to them and said, “Listen, I’ve got this really terrible insomnia too. Do you want to talk about it?” And he said, “Yeah.” So we started to talk about it. I mean, just talking about it, that in itself didn’t help specifically. I don’t know. We started to trade little bits of information about what might be useful. And he started doing research, and I’d been doing all this research and trying all these different things. And we became insomnia buddies. We hadn’t really actually met, but we were doing this by text. So we would wish each other a good night’s sleep each night, and all that sort of thing. Amy M: And then he encountered you on the internet, and he decided that he was going to spring for your program. I should say that I had already encountered your stuff months before that, and even started getting the initial emails. But because I’d gotten so paranoid, especially about finances, I didn’t want to spend the money. It was like identifying some other way out of this. I’m not going to pay for this. And I didn’t trust it also, to be frank. I thought, “Well, I’ll just spend the money and I still won’t sleep. I’m not going to do that.” Amy M: I didn’t really get it, and I just assumed it wouldn’t work. And honestly, it sounded too brutal. Really. It just sounded too damn hard, because I was also already so exhausted that the idea of being in bed for a shorter period of time, there was no way I was going to do that on top of what I was already suffering. It was already hard enough, I wasn’t going to make it worse. Martin Reed: I think it can be really difficult to come to terms with some of these techniques, like spending less time in bed, for example, because we equate more time in bed with more time asleep or more opportunities for sleep. But the fact of the matter is, what I think can be helpful is to just ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing at the current time proving to be helpful?” It might make you feel more comfortable spending long, long periods of time in bed, but is it really proving to be helpful helping you reach your longer term goals? If it’s not a problem and you’re comfortable spending really long periods of time in bed, and you don’t feel that it’s affecting your life in any way, it’s helping you live your life according to your values, then obviously there’s no need to make any changes. But maybe if you can recognize that, “This isn’t really helping me, my sleep doesn’t appear to be taking advantage of all these hours I’m spending in bed.” Martin Reed: Maybe it’s leading to some more fatigue, or it’s not really giving me that light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes it can be helpful to just think, “Well, maybe I can just make a change just for a couple of weeks as an experiment. And let’s just see if it does make any changes, if it is something that I want to pursue.” Amy M: You’re speaking very logically. And in this state of insomnia, logical thinking wasn’t really the norm for me. It was more like what felt like it might help. And it didn’t feel like being in bed for a short period of time would help. So my decision making capability was not so great. What you’re saying is really logical, it makes a lot of sense, but I wasn’t really making my decisions based on logic rationale at that time. Now I can, but then… Insomnia does this thing to you, where you just become, well I did, really negative. So what actually did convince me was that he signed up with your thing, and he started to get these email instructions, and he started to make progress. I felt like, “Damn. I’m not going to let him get ahead of me.” Amy M: And I thought, “Shoot, if it’s working for him, oh my God, I better do it too.” Right? So he was willing graciously to share with me the information you were giving him. So I just started following the same instructions, but it was really more like an ego thing, honestly, that caused me to finally think, “Oh my God. Can’t let this happen.” And then the other thing is that I realized that all I was really being asked to do was to stay up later. The part about getting out of bed earlier, well, I wasn’t going to deal with that. But it did start to dawn on me that, well, to go from 9:30, which had become the time that I got in bed, to 11:30, I could just sit upright and wait and those two hours would pass. And then I could try getting in bed then. But another thing that made a difference too, was the distinction between fatigue and tiredness and sleepiness, because I wasn’t experiencing any sleepiness. Masses of fatigue, but not sleepiness. Martin Reed: Yeah. So what happened when you started to stay up late? So was it just you noticed a change maybe from that sense of fatigue and exhaustion, it maybe started to turn into something else, something more akin to actual sleepiness. Is that how you describe it? Amy M: Yeah, it did. It did. It turned into sleepiness. And I think in the beginning, it didn’t really make much difference. And I have to say the part that was really difficult for me, was to get out of bed in the morning. Because initially I was getting out of bed late also. So I knew I had to scale that back. And my sleep buddy was now getting up at 5:30 in the morning. And it just seemed like something I just couldn’t do, so I didn’t do it. But I did start to get out of bed earlier and earlier. And as I got used to it, I guess the period of time I was in bed got shorter and shorter. So I think what started to happen initially was that I started to get those first two hours of sleep again, and then I’d wake up. And then there’d be a long stretch of time, during which I’d just lie there. Amy M: And then I maybe would get another hour, say from 4:00 to 5:00. So I’d put those together and I’d have three hours. Okay. Well, three is better than two. And slowly, slowly I’d get maybe two and then a long stretch, and maybe another two, say 4:00 to 6:00, something like that. So then it was four hours. And then maybe three hours in the beginning and two in the morning, and that was a huge victory because now that was three plus two was five, “Oh my God, this is it. I’ve got five hours.” It was broken sleep, broken by a lot, but at least it was a bit more. So really slowly I would get these pieces, and the pieces would extend a little bit at a time. So it increased the amount of overall time I was getting each night. And then I had one night when I slept for six hours, and it was just amazing, like, “Oh, wow. I won. This worked. Oh my God.” Amy M: And my experience of the day was so different, but then the next night I couldn’t sleep again, so it was like that. So I guess that went on for about a month and a half. And it just gradually, gradually increased over time. And then the pieces would sometimes merge and sometimes not. So sometimes I would get five hours straight, then the next night I wouldn’t. So it happened really slowly over a period of time. And then I started to sleep through the night, maybe five hours at first, and then after a while maybe it was six. Alternating, five, six, five, six, six and a half, back to five, like that. And I think that started around April. So the month of April was the first month that I started to actually sleep every night. Yeah. Martin Reed: That’s great. Amy M: And then it got longer. So now I’m sleeping every night. I mean, periodically I might have a night of four hours or something, but basically now, I think it’s around seven, seven and a half, sometimes eight, sometimes longer. But the point is I can now just get in bed and fall asleep. That’s just amazing. Martin Reed: That’s incredible. Amy M: It’s incredible. Yeah. It’s really incredible. Martin Reed: Listening to you describe the process something that stood out for me was, how you mentioned when you first heard about this technique of spending less time in bed. First thought is, that just sounds uncomfortable, sounds brutal. Sounds like it’s not going to be helpful. Sounds like something I just can’t even consider right now. But you allowed yourself to think about it. And then maybe it was percolating in the back of your mind for a while. And then you heard about your friend doing it, was finding it helpful. So instead of maybe just going crazy and only spending four or five hours in bed, you started off a little bit more gradually, maybe with a little bit more, maybe some more self-compassion or something. You just said, “Okay. I’ll just stay up later for a couple of hours. I won’t worry too much about the time I get out of bed for now. I’ll just start by going to bed a couple of hours later.” Martin Reed: And I think that’s great because, what happened there really was you got started. Even if we only feel comfortable starting off by maybe going to bed an hour later or two hours later, that’s still, I think, something that can be a really positive step. Because then if we do start to notice some improvements, it gives us that confidence and that motivation to then maybe make a few more changes, maybe go to bed a little bit later, or maybe then really work on getting out of bed at a consistent time in the morning, which can then lead to further improvements. So I think that’s helpful that you described that process, because some people might think that for it to work you’ve got to go all in, no looking back, you’ve got to be really strict, really brutal with yourself, sergeant major style, but you don’t. You can just start with small steps in the right direction, and that can really be a great way to get started on this transformation. Which is what you’ve experienced yourself. Amy M: Yeah. I’d say it’s true. Actually the thing is I completely ruled out trying this in the beginning. Yeah. It wasn’t like I was just thinking maybe this would work, maybe it wouldn’t. It was like, “There’s no way in hell I’m going to do this.” Martin Reed: Yeah. So was it just because the experience of your friend doing it and getting results, that just made you give it a try, or was there anything else? Amy M: It was. It was. Because I had heard about this from several people by then. Yeah, and just said, “No way.” I don’t know. I mean, I think that’s just a characteristic of my personality I’m not proud of. Yeah. I guess I hate to say it, but yeah, it was true. It was like, I wasn’t going to let him start sleeping and I wasn’t going to. But whatever it was it doesn’t really matter, it caused me to start to do that little bit of it. That piece. Martin Reed: I think it’s helpful to be a little bit self compassionate and understanding, because we’ve tried a lot of things, right. When we’ve been struggling with sleep, we’ve tried a lot of different things and yet most of them haven’t proved to be helpful. So when we come across yet another suggestion or yet another technique, and we’re just told to blindly trust it. And when it sounds as though it might be uncomfortable, like spending less time in bed, it makes complete sense that our brain’s default position is going to be, “Uh-uh (negative). No way. It’s going to be another one of these things we’re going to try, it’s not going to work. But this one just sounds like we’re going to put ourselves through torture and not get any results.” So I think it’s understandable why we would have that hesitancy or want to just brawl it out as a default position. That’s completely understandable. Amy M: Yeah. I would say that self-compassion was not something I had in spades through all of this. And actually gaining self-compassion has been a big part of what I did actually learn from this experience. And now the current experience I’m having, trying to resolve the other physical issue that developed while I was going through this. So yeah, it’s really important to have self-compassion, but something I was lacking in. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think self-compassion’s a big thing that we tend to not really pay much attention to, or gloss over. I like to think of self-compassion as just acting like a best friend, but to yourself. So if a friend of ours comes to us with a struggle, we tend not to have any trouble being compassionate at that time. But when it comes to our own struggles, sometimes it can be hard to have that same level of compassion, and especially when it comes to sleep issues. When we have difficult nights, we can be really hard on ourselves, we can blame ourselves even for having a difficult night. We tend to get lost then. That’s why I think having this self-compassion can be really helpful. Amy M: Yeah. I mean, it definitely is. I remember, I mean, I was trying to develop it, but it didn’t come easily. And in fact, I think really the self-compassion started more after I was already sleeping. And it’s really more developed where I’m having to be really gentle with myself and listen to my body and talk to my body. And yeah, it’s coming on more later. But if anybody has it, yeah, that’s definitely an asset. Martin Reed: I completely agree. What a practical way, I think, that we can just practice some self-compassion, might just be after a difficult night, maybe doing something nice during the day like treating ourselves, almost like giving ourself a reward or doing something that might help us feel a little bit better. Because often our default position after really difficult nights might be to do less during the day, for example, or blame ourselves for a difficult night. If we can just do something kind for ourselves after a difficult night, not only can that be helpful just from that self-compassion standpoint, but it can also just slightly improve the quality of our day. And maybe that could also come with a slight benefit of helping us recognize that, what we choose to do during the day also can influence how we feel during the day and the quality of our day, rather than it being completely a hundred percent, always determined by what happens during the night. Amy M: I mean, that’s a good point. I think you’re right. It’s not something that I did or really was able to do. In fact, especially in the beginning, I think a lot of it was the opposite of that. I would lie in bed at night and think about things that were unresolved. And then during the day I was too exhausted to really… And I couldn’t think clearly enough to really take on a lot of these things, and resolve them. In fact, in the beginning when I was really desperate and I was calling the doctor helpline at my health insurance frequently, and trying to talk to somebody who would have something for me, I remember one doctor saying to me, “What you’re dealing with, the falling asleep and waking up two hours later, there’s no medication for that. You will not be helped by medication.” He didn’t really offer a solution except to drink camomile tea. Amy M: Yeah, the whole health industry thing was so not helpful. And I went down that road many, many times looking for answers. But I think what you’re saying is true and right, is if one can do it, yeah, absolutely. Martin Reed: Yeah. And like you implied there, it’s not always easy to be self-compassionate, it’s not always easy to do some enjoyable things during the day after really difficult nights. Sometimes though, we need to do things or it’s worth trying things that might not come easily. If nothing else, just to try them out and just to see if they are going to be helpful or not. Amy M: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, I’m still working on that now. That’s a process for sure. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a skill, self-compassion is definitely a skill just like relaxation is a skill. It can be really easy for us to think that we should just have these abilities or these skills just as part of who we are, but we don’t. And if we’ve never practiced self-compassion before, if we’ve never practiced relaxation before, we’re not going to notice improvements right away. It’s not going to come easy, it does take practice. It’s like any skill, like learning a new musical instrument, for example. We can probably realize that we’re not going to become great guitar players the first time you pick up a guitar, but yet when it comes to more emotional skills like self-compassion or relaxation, we can get trapped into thinking that it should be easy, but why should it be easy? It’s not going to be easy if we’re not skilled in those things, it does take practice. Amy M: It’s true. Martin Reed: And something else that I like that you touched upon, was when you started to go to bed later and you started to get these improvements in sleep, was that these improvements weren’t completely linear. It wasn’t like one night was good then the next night was better, the next night was just as good or better, the next night was just as good or better. There were ups and downs along the way, and it did take time. It wasn’t just this magical transformation that happened right away, it was something you had to stick to with the ups and downs. I think that’s helpful for people to hear, because we can believe or expect or put pressure on ourselves to just do better and better every night after every night, but there are always ups and downs. When you were going through that, going through, maybe you had some better nights and then some difficult nights, how did you get through those difficult nights in terms of having that motivation to just keep going? Amy M: I think when I shifted from going to bed at 9:30, and I don’t honestly really know why I picked 9:30. Nonetheless, when I shifted from going to bed at 9:30 to going to bed at 11:30… I don’t know. I think I made a commitment just to try this. And then it suddenly didn’t really make any sense to go to bed at 9:30 again, for example. And it started to make a kind of sense. And I started to realize like, “Oh, wait a minute, this is this thing that could work. So I’ll just keep doing that.” And I was going to get in bed anyway every night, so I might as well just keep doing it. It wasn’t really like at that point it made any sense to go back to what I’d been doing before. It wouldn’t have made any sense to start taking trazadone again. So I just got in the habit of going to bed at 11:30. Sometimes I’d be at that head bobbing phase by 11:30, but it just became the new thing I was doing. Does it make any sense? Martin Reed: Yeah, I think it does make sense. And it’s something that some people can struggle with. Some people like yourself, from what you’re saying, can just come up with this mindset of, “I’m just going to set it and forget about it. So from now on, I’m just going to not go to bed at…” In your example, 9:30, “I’m going to just going to go to bed at 11:30. And whether it’s a good night, an okay night, a really difficult night, doesn’t matter. The next night, I’m still going to go to bed at 11:30.” And I think that can be really helpful, because what it does is it shifts our attention and our efforts onto something we can control, like we can control the time we choose to go to bed. Away from our brain’s default position of trying to put effort into sleep or trying to control sleep, trying to monitor for sleep. Martin Reed: So instead of, “I’m having a really difficult night, I’ve got to sleep. Maybe tomorrow I should go to bed earlier.” Getting caught up in all those thought processes, we just have this default process of, “I’m still going to go to bed tomorrow at 11:30.” So you stick to this, you make this commitment. Like you said, you commit to what you can control, which is your behaviors, accept the things that we can’t control, which is what happens from night to night. And if we can be consistent with that approach, I think it gives us the best opportunity to experience those ongoing improvements. Like you explained, where sleep is still a bit fragmented, but every now and then there’ll be that little bit of extra sleep. Then a little bit of extra sleep, a little bit less sleep, a little bit more wakefulness. Until you had that real, what sounded that breakthrough moment when you just had that stretch of unbroken sleep. And that sounds like maybe that was that real light bulb moment for you. Amy M: Yeah. Until the next night when it didn’t happen again. Yeah. It’s so funny looking back on it, how I would lie there and I would try to… I mean, I remember at one point I was trying, right? I was trying to settle further, deeper, deeper, deeper into sleep. It didn’t work either. I remember hearing you say something about all you really have to do is get in bed and close your eyes, and I thought, “Oh, wow. Oh, remember that? That sounds way too easy.” I mean, the thing about all of it is that it’s involuntary. I mean, there’s so much we have no control over whatsoever, it has to just be turned over to the body. And all our trying is useless. Martin Reed: That’s definitely where we get caught up when we try to control the process of sleep. That’s why I think struggle is a great word, because we get involved in that struggle, we’re struggling with sleep, trying to make sleep happen. And the struggle really is what the problem is. It’s the fact that we’re involved in that struggle. But it makes sense why we do, because we want to fix the problem. So we’re going to put effort into it, but sleep is that one thing that doesn’t respond well to effort. Martin Reed: One reason why I think the technique that you found helpful, of going to bed later, spending a little bit less time in bed, is it can satisfy our desire to do something. So I think it’s hard to just hear, “Don’t do anything. The problem is you’re doing too much to try and make sleep happen. Just don’t do anything.” So then you go to bed and it’s like, “All right, how do I not do anything?” Because your brain wants that thing to do, right? So I think having some helpful things to do like going to bed later, to build that sleep drive, that can be helpful because now we’ve got some changes that we can make, or some behaviors we can implement to satisfy our desire to do something that can help create better conditions for sleep, without us falling into that trap of trying to directly control sleep or make sleep happen. How would you describe an average night these days? Amy M: Oh, I mean, I just get into bed and fall asleep. Periodically though, I wake up in the middle of the night. And one of the other issues for me is that my spouse comes to bed later than I do, and then meditates for a while, and there’s candles on and all this stuff. And previously I’d always just slept right through that. And then when I had insomnia, of course, that felt like a hindrance to my being able to fall asleep. And then now I just sleep right through it again. But most of the time now, yeah, I just fall asleep and then I wake up in the morning. It’s a miracle really. Amy M: I mean, there are nights when I’ve got to wake up really early in the morning, so I end up with only four and a half hours or something. But usually now, it’s like I just learned how to do it again. Martin Reed: I think we’ve covered a lot of really good ground, really good points. I’m really grateful for you to come on and share your experience and your transformation at the end of the day, and this is what I consider it to be. But there is one last question that I’d like to ask you before I let you go, and it’s a question that I ask everyone, so it’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening, and feels as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, and that they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Amy M: I would tell them to try this. I would tell them to try it, even if it seems like it’s too hard and too brutal, just give it a shot. Just try maybe just going to bed a bit later. Yeah, I guess that’s what I’d say. Yeah. It worked for me. I don’t know if it will work for everyone, but it’s certainly worth a try. Yeah. And I really liked what you said too at the end of those videos, like, “You can sleep, because your body will eventually remember, even if it seems like you can’t.” Martin Reed: I think that’s a great note to end on. So thanks again for taking the time to come onto the podcast, Amy. It’s been great to have you on. Amy M: Thank you. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to move away from struggling with insomnia and toward living the life you want to live, I would love to help. You can get started right now by enrolling in my online course or you can book my phone coaching package. My online course runs for six weeks. It will help you make changes that can create better conditions for sleep, it will help you identify and get rid of any behaviors that might be making sleep more difficult, and it will help you respond to insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it in a more workable way. You can work through the course in two ways. You can choose the self-coaching option and work through it by yourself with the support of an online forum that is available only to clients. Martin Reed: Or, you can choose to add one-on-one email coaching and work through the course with me by your side. With the one-on-one coaching option, you get unlimited email access to me for eight weeks, starting from the day you enroll. Any time you have a question or concern, any time you are unsure about anything, any time you want to focus on the challenges you face or any difficulties that show up, you can email me and I will be there to coach and support you. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com. Martin Reed: With the phone coaching package, we start with a one-hour call (voice only or video — your choice) and come up with an initial two-week plan that will help you create better conditions for sleep and practice moving away from struggling with insomnia and all the difficult thoughts and feelings that come with it. You get unlimited email access to me for two weeks after the call and a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Jennifer’s issues with sleep began 18 years ago when she started to wean her firstborn from breastfeeding. When Jennifer fell pregnant again, things got better — until it was time to wean her second child. As the mother of five children, Jennifer went through this cycle for a long time — and when she decided that she was done having children, she started to get really nervous about sleep. Jennifer tried lots of different things in an attempt to get rid of her insomnia — she tried different foods, she experimented with supplements, she tried medication, she tried alcohol. Fortunately, Jennifer recognized that her body wasn’t missing any vital vitamin, mineral, or chemical — and that a hormone imbalance wasn’t to blame for her ongoing issues with sleep. After listening to a few episodes of the Insomnia Coach podcast, Jennifer felt that it was her belief system that was the real reason why she was enduring an endless struggle with sleep. At this point, she felt ready to implement some changes that would lead to new habits and a new relationship with her thoughts and beliefs that would help create better conditions for sleep. When Jennifer started to feel a strong sense of sleepiness again (rather than ongoing fatigue and brain fog) and learned from experience that sleeping pills weren’t doing anything for her, she felt confident she was on the right track. Ultimately, Jennifer regained confidence in her natural ability to sleep after learning that she wasn’t alone and that other people were experiencing insomnia in a similar way to her, and by making changes to her behaviors and the relationship she had with her thoughts. It was these changes that helped create better conditions for sleep and helped Jennifer put chronic insomnia behind her. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that nobody needs to live with chronic insomnia and that evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques can help you enjoy better sleep for the rest of your life. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Jennifer. Thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Jennifer B.: Yeah, you’re welcome. Happy to be here. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on. I’m really excited for our conversation, which I’m just going to start right at the beginning, like I always do. If you could just tell us when your problems with sleep began, and what you think might have caused those initial issues with sleep? Jennifer B.: So I had problems when I was weaning my firstborn from breastfeeding. He is 18 now, and so I struggled with it for quite a while. I had gone to the doctor, and they had suggested some Benadryl. I tied it to the weaning, and it really didn’t get better until I got pregnant six months later with my second child. I have five children, so I cycled through this for 11 or 12 years. When we were finished having children, I really struggled with it, and was convinced that I had some sort of hormone imbalance or hormone problem that was leading to it, because I would sleep well for the duration of the pregnancy and the breastfeeding part. But it was always that weaning that triggered it. Martin Reed: Wow. So I’m guessing a workable solution for you wasn’t to just keep having more, and more, and more kids. Jennifer B.: Right. By the time I had my last one at 40, it just wasn’t going to be an option. That’s when I really started to get a lot more nervous about it. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. So what were the nights like when you were struggling with sleep? Maybe you can just describe what an average or a typical night was like when you were going through that struggle. Jennifer B.: Sure. I would lay awake there for a while, an hour or two. In the early days, I would get up and take a little swig of NyQuil, and then go to sleep, or I would go to sleep on the couch, and then I wouldn’t be able to sleep in my bed. Then I would wake up in the middle of the night and then not be able to go back to sleep. Then I would just get more frustrated and more anxious about it. Martin Reed: Yeah. So you mentioned the time you felt maybe it was hormonal related, because it tended to crop up when you were weaning. When you were struggling with that wakefulness during the night, do you feel like it was really hard to fall asleep because maybe there was a hormonal issue? Or do you think there was some something else at play, like maybe your mind was racing, or there were some thoughts that you were really struggling with? Jennifer B.: My mind wasn’t really racing until I got very anxious about it. So I had convinced myself that it was a hormonal problem. Then when I thought about that more, that’s when I would get more anxious. But it wasn’t really about stress or anything going on during the day. It was more about what my internal beliefs were about what was causing the problem, because it was just so consistent through all five of the babies that I had. Martin Reed: Yeah. So what do you feel it was about this idea of struggling with sleep or just experiencing long periods of wakefulness during the night that maybe created some anxiety and maybe fed into this insomnia and these prolonged periods of wakefulness? Jennifer B.: I was always worried about how I was going to function the next day, especially the more kids I have, and the job that I have as well. I wanted to be able to function for work. So it would get really hard. So I would end up just laying there, trying to rest the best that I could, and not get so angry about it. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think a lot of people are going to identify with that. I think one of the biggest concerns, if not the biggest concern when I’m working with clients is how are we going to function the next day? That concern really is at the root of so much of the anxiety, and in turn it almost becomes a self fulfilling prophecy in terms of, because we’re worried about what the next day will be like, maybe we’re putting more pressure on ourselves to sleep. We’re putting a lot of effort into sleep, a lot of monitoring on sleep. That, in itself, makes sleep more difficult. Martin Reed: Then because sleep has become so much of a focus, it can also make the days more difficult, even if we do actually have quite an okay night or a decent night, because it’s just something that we’re always thinking about, always worried about. Okay, maybe last night was good. But what’s the next night going to bring? It does feed into itself and just becomes this vicious cycle of worry and sleep disruption. Does that sound like something familiar to you? Jennifer B.: Yeah, definitely. I remember nights where I would wake up early, and not be able to go back to sleep. Then I would start craving sleep for the next night, like I would just say, “Okay, I’ll make it up tomorrow night.” Then my husband has always been a great sleeper. So I would get so angry at him, as he just laid there, sleeping. I’m thinking, “God, he’s such a showoff. This isn’t fair.” Martin Reed: It’s really funny, I think there is another podcast episode where I had someone say virtually the exact same thing as you. It seems strange, because even when I’m working with clients, it seems like the partners that people with insomnia end up with are kind of like the world’s best sleepers. It’s just a really strange observation that I’ve made over the years. Jennifer B.: Yeah, that definitely applies to me. He can sleep anywhere. Martin Reed: Yeah. Just leading on from that, I think there may even be a silver lining to that, because I think a common question that we have when we’ve been struggling with sleep for a long time is what do I do to make sleep happen? What do I think about when I get into bed? What can I do to fall asleep? If we have a partner that sleeps really well, maybe we’ll ask that person. Then what tends to happen is we kind of get that blank stare back. “I don’t know what I do to make sleep happen. I just get into bed, and then I sleep.” Did you ever have that conversation with your husband? Jennifer B.: Yes, absolutely. Yes, definitely. He didn’t understand that. Martin Reed: Yeah. But sometimes, I think that can be really helpful, because maybe it provides a little bit of evidence that all these efforts and all these completely justifiable concerns about sleep, and the strong desire for sleep, and the striving for sleep, maybe that’s contributing to the problem, because if we have a partner that sleeps really well, and they have no clue what they’re doing to make sleep happen, maybe that suggests that if we get to that place where we can maybe abandon all these efforts, abandon all this striving, maybe we’ll be like our partner and sleep well, and not even give sleep a second thought. Jennifer B.: Right. I have a tendency to overanalyze a problem, and then try a bunch of different solutions for it. I’ll do that until I find one that works. Really, what worked was doing the opposite of that, which didn’t make any sense. But it’s true. Once I didn’t care about it anymore, then it seemed to go a lot better. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s completely understandable, it makes complete sense why we would look for a solution, because whenever we have a problem in our life, we want to look for a solution. So that’s completely understandable. Our natural inclination to put effort into a problem, so if sleep is a problem, we want to put effort into it to fix it. Everything in life responds really well to effort, right? But sleep is kind of that outlier. I think this is where we can so easily get caught up, because our whole life experience associates effort with good outcomes. Martin Reed: So we do the same thing when we struggle with sleep, but the problem is with sleep, the more effort we put into it, the more striving, the more desire, the more difficult it becomes. We kind of make conditions more difficult for sleep to occur. That’s kind of where we can get trapped, because then we start to really, we can really start to worry that something is uniquely wrong with us. Maybe we’ve lost our ability to sleep, or there is something really, seriously wrong with our ability to sleep, or our sleep systems. So I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s understandable why we’re putting effort into sleep, and if we found that sleep hasn’t responded to that effort, again, that is normal and to be expected. Jennifer B.: Yeah, that was my experience. Martin Reed: So you touched upon you were using that NyQuil every now and then to try and generate some sleep. What kind of other things did you try in an attempt to get more sleep, that looking back, perhaps didn’t prove to be that helpful? Jennifer B.: I tried Benadryl. I would get so sleepy with that during the day. Then it progressed from there, to some of the prescription sleeping pills, several different types of those. Then I’d try beer, and then no alcohol, and then exercise, and melatonin, and magnesium, and black cohosh, and herbs. I’d go to the natural foods store, and try to figure out what I needed, what my body was lacking or had too much of to try to get that balance. It didn’t matter, that wasn’t the problem. I think the real problem was the belief system and believing that there was a bigger problem than what there really was. Martin Reed: Yeah. Did you ever find that that search for the solution, whether it’s all these different supplements, or medications, on reflection, maybe that was feeding into this concern, and this worry, and this focus on sleep? Jennifer B.: Oh, absolutely. Yes, definitely. Martin Reed: Yeah. The reason I ask that question is because I think it’s something that so many people listening to this are going to identify with. Again, it goes back to that natural inclination and that completely understandable desire we have to fix a problem. But the trouble with chronic insomnia is it’s not really caused by a mineral deficiency, or a vitamin deficiency, or hormonal deficiency. But yet we can get really caught up in believing that or trying these different supplements, these different experiments. Soon, we can even find ourselves maybe thinking less about sleep, and thinking more about, okay, what’s the next experiment to try? What’s the next ritual I can try? What’s the next thing, the next X, Y, or Z? Jennifer B.: Right. Then you pour over the internet, and try to Google solutions. It just made it so much worse for me as I got older. Then I got closer to perimenopause, and then I thought, “Oh my god, it’s going to get worse. Then I’ll be menopausal, and then I’ll never sleep for the rest of my life.” So it would build on the anxiety, and then the anxiety would make it so much worse. Finally, I just made a decision to figure it out. Martin Reed: Yeah. So let’s talk about that. So you found out about these cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia, these CBT-I techniques that I talk about. Jennifer B.: Right. I had talked to my doctor about it, and she was always willing to refill these sleeping pills. I kind of wish she wouldn’t. But I felt dependent on them until I was ready. I had listened to a couple of your podcasts. But she had mentioned a few of the techniques, like getting out of bed, and not making the bed a place where you lie awake and get angry, things like that. I thought, “I want to sleep. I don’t want to get out of bed. I want to get better.” Jennifer B.: It wasn’t until I listened to a couple of your podcasts and thought, “I could have done that podcast, or I can relate to this girl, or I tried these different things that this person tried.” Then after I had listened to two or three of them, then I knew that I could change my beliefs about it. Once I did that, that’s when everything started to work. Once I committed to the techniques, and believed that they were going to work. I think once I stopped believing that there was a big problem with my hormones, or with minerals, or with my chemical composition, that’s when things started to get so much better. Martin Reed: So it sounds like you were already familiar with a couple of the techniques, a couple of these CBT-I techniques. But it wasn’t until you really heard real life examples of people using them, and discussing, and talking about their experience with them that you had that confidence, maybe to really go all in and give them a try yourself? Is that right? Jennifer B.: Yeah, absolutely. There was a nurse on the podcast that I listened to maybe about a year and a half ago, and then there was a pediatrician. I related so much to those two women. Once I heard those, then that’s when things changed, and I knew that I could get better without having to take anything to go to sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. So what kind of techniques did you end up implementing? I think you just touched upon this idea of getting out of bed when being in bed doesn’t feel good. Another core component of these techniques involves allotting a more appropriate amount of time for sleep, spending an amount of time in bed that’s similar to the kind of sleep that you’re currently getting. Were they the kind of techniques what you were implementing? Jennifer B.: Yeah. So when the pandemic started, and my work shut down, I thought, “This is a perfect time.” That was when I had become very scared about this for the rest of my life. When that happened, I thought, “If I don’t do it now, I’m not going to do it ever, probably.” So now that I don’t have to worry about getting out of bed at a certain time, or having this not work, I can really focus on it. So I had a piece of paper and a pencil next to my bed where I could take notes about what time I went to sleep and what time I woke up at. Jennifer B.: Then I went to the library and got some books that were interesting enough, but boring enough, like a book about grass, and a book about farming and ranching, where there were some interesting stories, but I really didn’t have much in common with the people writing them. So I would get pretty bored reading them. I would go downstairs, and put my head lamp on, and read for a while. Then when my head would bob, I knew it was time to go back. So I wrote down the times, and then figured out how long I was sleeping. It didn’t take very long. I would say maybe a week or so before I knew it would definitely work. So I think for me, it was just committing to the whole CBT-I process for about a week before I really saw substantial change, where I could sleep long periods of time without having to take any sleeping aids. Martin Reed: Wow, that’s incredibly fast to get those early results within a week or so. What was it, you mentioned that it took you about a week for you to realize there was some change going on. What was the symptom of that positive change? What kind of differences were you noticing? Jennifer B.: I felt sleepy. I just felt like I couldn’t go on anymore unless I went to sleep. Another thing that really helped me was when I had made the decision and had a date that I was going to start implementing the techniques, and sticking by all of the rules. I had gone and I bought a new bedspread, and new sheets, and new pillows. I said to myself, “These are going to be the sheets that I actually fall asleep on, and sleep soundly.” I got rid of my old bedspread, and my old sheets that I had had for years. Jennifer B.: I think creating that environment was really helpful for my brain to know, “Okay, these are the sheets I’m gong to sleep on and not have to take anything.” So that was another big change that I made, at least for me and my bedroom that was helpful. But I think the biggest thing was my belief system was changed. After a week or so of doing the sleep deprivation thing, I just felt differently. Like, I was so sleepy that I had to go to bed and sleep. I think the trigger was just the fact that I started believing that I didn’t need to have an aid or that I had a problem. Martin Reed: I think it can be so powerful to rediscover that really strong sense of sleepiness, because in my experience, people with chronic insomnia tend not to actually have that much sleepiness, but have a ton of fatigue. Feeling exhausted, worn out, run down. It’s really easy to confuse that with sleepiness. But there is a difference. Jennifer B.: Oh, I agree, very much. Because I was foggy brained for at least a decade, and never really felt particularly well rested. So once I was actually sleepy, then it changed for sure. I would try to go to be dearly, thinking that would help. That certainly didn’t. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think that’s one of these areas where we can get caught up, because when we mistake that fatigue for sleepiness, fatigue isn’t a sign that we need to sleep or that the conditions are right for sleep. But sleepiness is. So when we get those two mixed up, which is quite common, even people without insomnia can mix those symptoms up, if we go to bed when we’re fatigued rather than sleepy, it makes sense that we’re probably not going to fall asleep, because we’re not sleepy enough for sleep. Martin Reed: Then because we’re not falling asleep, if we have concern about that, it’s just going to heighten that concern. Then it makes conditions even more difficult for sleep to occur. So rediscovering that sense of sleepiness by maybe allotting less time for sleep or going to bed later, waiting for that really strong sense of sleepiness to appear, it can really be a breakthrough moment for many clients. It sounds like that was your breakthrough moment too. Jennifer B.: Yeah. It was such a relief. Martin Reed: Yeah. Absolutely. So what other kind of, were there any other behavior … Before we move onto the thought side of things, were there any other behavioral changes you made? Jennifer B.: I noticed a lot of things as I thought about this more during my time when I was analyzing. That wasn’t all bad, over analyzing, because there were things that I, once I started sleeping better, I did tie to not falling asleep or not sleeping through the night, or waking up early. That was if I would fall asleep anywhere other than my bed, so the couch, or in my kids’ beds after I would read to them, they would want me to lay with them until they fell asleep. I told them I have to stop doing that, I can’t do it anymore. We can read on the couch, and then I can lay with you for a minute, but that’s about it. So not laying there for 20 or 30 minutes, dozing off, and then going to my own bed. Jennifer B.: Screen time is a big thing for me. I still have to be really careful for that. Being aware of caffeine, that was big for me. Anything after 12 o’clock would affect me, even if it was just a piece of chocolate with caffeine, that sometimes would be something to keep me up a little bit later. Alcohol, I could not drink a lot of alcohol. If I knew I was going to, I would have to say to myself, “Okay, I might have a bad night’s sleep tonight.” I did a lot of meditation for this, and I still try to maintain that at least four or five days a week, because it really helps to not get so anxious about it, and to not think about it as much. Martin Reed: So what is it about meditation in particular that you feel was helpful? Jennifer B.: It was helpful to not get so anxious about it, and to not care so much about sleep, and to focus on something else besides work stress, or family stress, or worrying about falling asleep. It just kind of gave my mind a break. I look forward to doing it. I know that if I skip time for medication, I definitely feel a little bit more stressed and anxious, which can lead to the insomnia again. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think meditation, or any relaxation technique, is really an interesting topic of discussion, because it can be, it’s really easy to kind of get caught up in it as a concept of being a sleep effort. I’m going to meditate to try and generate sleep. If we go down that road, it’s really unhelpful, because it just leads to us putting more pressure on ourselves to sleep, as we’re supposed to be relaxing or we’re supposed to be meditating, in the back of our brain, the brain starts monitoring are we asleep yet? Are we feeling sleepy yet? Martin Reed: But on the other hand, if we can use meditation or relaxation as a way to generate relaxation, as a way to build skill in adjusting our relationship to our thoughts, shifting attention elsewhere, then I think it can be really helpful. A byproduct can be creating better conditions for sleep through a weakened arousal system. So I think it can be a bit of a double edged sword. If sleep is our intention, it becomes one of those unhelpful sleep efforts. But if it’s something to just promote relaxation and self awareness, and acknowledging and accepting thoughts as thoughts, that’s where it can be really helpful. Jennifer B.: Yes. So it was very calming once I got past that initial motivation for sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah. Jennifer B.: When I thought of it as more of a calming activity, and a way to keep stress from building up too terribly much, then it was better. It helps to avoid negativity in my mind, too. All of those are helpful for staying calm. Martin Reed: Yeah. Do you find that your meditation practice is helpful even when you’re not actively engaged in meditation? So for example, if during the day, when you’re active, some uncomfortable thoughts start to come into your mind. Do you feel like you now are more skilled or better able to manage your reaction to those thoughts thanks to meditation practice? Jennifer B.: Yes, definitely. So at work, if I have a stressful event, then I find myself just automatically going into some of the breathing techniques, and calming techniques. I find that if I’m in a period of time where I’m not meditating, or I had given it up for a week or two, that’s when I get a lot more stressed out. It seems to effect me where I can’t bounce back to the next activity, I feel. More stressed if I’m not doing the meditation. Martin Reed: Yeah. How long do you feel that, if you remember, how long were you practicing meditation before you found this is helping, this is helping me change my relationship with these difficult thoughts? When did you notice some positive improvements from that? Jennifer B.: I would say it took a few weeks to really see a substantial difference. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it was kind of a loaded question, because I was expecting you to give me that answer. I would have been surprised if you had told me, “Oh yeah, just a few nights, a few days of practice, and then I was all good.” Because relaxation, really, is a skill. Right? It’s something that we have to learn to do. It takes a lot of practice. Jennifer B.: Oh, absolutely. I would start with just five minutes, and then I worked my way up to 10, and then 12. Then eventually 20 minutes or so. I didn’t really go beyond that. But it did take a few weeks to really see a substantial benefit with this stress reduction. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think that’s another area where we can kind of get caught up as well. First of all, as I just touched upon, if we’re doing something in a bid to generate sleep or sleepiness, it’s probably not that helpful. But also when people try relaxation techniques, if they’re new to them, we might just try them a couple of times. “Oh, no, this isn’t helping,” then move onto the next thing, just decide it’s not working. But it’s kind of like a skill. If one day we decide, “I want to learn how to play the piano.” We probably wouldn’t expect to be able to play the piano really well after just two days of practice. We recognize that it’s going to take a lot of practice. Relaxation is exactly the same. Jennifer B.: Yeah. It is. I agree. Martin Reed: Yeah. So I think earlier on you were talking about the thinking side of things, how your thoughts and your beliefs have since changed since you were struggling with sleep. Were there any specific thoughts or beliefs that you can recognize now, looking back, that were maybe not helpful, not that accurate, and that might have even been perpetuating this sleep disruption? Jennifer B.: I am going to go back to yeah, that hormone imbalance. Because it seemed to happen so frequently, every month, for a couple of days. That was pretty consistent, plus the weaning. Then being able to sleep once I would have kids, or I would be pregnant. I think that it was really … Just that thought, I had just convinced myself so much that there was a problem, and that everything that I was trying wasn’t working. The anxiety would build more and more. Then I would believe more and more, since the things I weren’t trying weren’t working, then it just was so frustrating. Until I found your site, and listened to a couple of the podcasts. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think, I don’t know if we’re touched upon this yet. But when we were talking, before this, before recording this episode, we were talking about the role of sleeping pills… Jennifer B.: I would say it was every single night, and it started as a quarter of a pill, then a half, and then a whole one, and then two or three, or four of them just to get to sleep. So it was more, and more, and more. Then my brain would be so foggy during the day that I couldn’t function, and I knew that there had to be a better solution. It seems like everybody could sleep but me. But yeah, just seemed to be more and more of these sleeping pills. Then I thought, people don’t have to take these. There has to be some other way. Martin Reed: How did you get to that point where you maybe had this realization or a changing of belief that, “Huh, maybe I don’t need these pills to generate sleep.” Or, “Maybe I can sleep without them. Maybe I can sleep well without them.” Jennifer B.: I had a refill of one of them. When I got the refill, I had a different shaped pill, I think. I had two or three nights where they weren’t working, at all. I thought, “They had to have given me the wrong medicine, they had to give me an expired medicine. This can’t be right. I’m going to go down to the pharmacy.” That’s what I did. I had woken up in the middle of the night and went there when they opened. It was a pharmacy where they opened really early, or were up all night. I can’t remember for sure. But I went down there, and I took the pills. I said, “You had to have given me the wrong ones. These aren’t working, I haven’t slept in three days, and I’ve had to take more.” I’m like, “This is wrong. You have to change it.” Jennifer B.: So she took the pills, and she’s like, “I just opened this bottle. Here you go.” It was very unpleasant, because I hadn’t slept that entire night. Went and yelled at this pharmacist. I got home, and I’m like, “What the heck just happened? What did I just do? I accused them of giving me this wrong medicine.” I got home, and I just thought, “That was so wrong. I have to make a change. I can’t be going down to the pharmacy and telling me they’re giving me the wrong stuff.” But that was a turning point for me, when I thought about what I did, and how ridiculous that was. So that was just prior to the pandemic, maybe a month or two. I had decided that I have to figure it out. Jennifer B.: I have to find something that’s going to work. I had talked to my doctor about it. When I thought more about the things that she was saying, “You hae to get out of bed, you have to make your bed a place for sleep, and that’s all.” A lot of the CBT-I techniques, once I had tied them in, and watched enough YouTube videos on CBT-I, and found your site, and listened to some of the other women. That’s when I knew I could a make a change. But it was that, yeah, that one trip to the pharmacy, where I was like, “This is wrong. There has got to be something different that I can od.” Martin Reed: So did they give you the wrong pills? Or was it just the fact they were a different shape? Jennifer B.: No, no. It was just they weren’t working anymore. If you take them enough, then they stop working, they lose their efficacy. That was really what the problem was. So no, they didn’t. Martin Reed: Wow. It’s amazing the things that, these coincidences or these events, these random events, they can enter our lives but just be real light bulb moments. Just change our whole way of thinking. Jennifer B.: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. So I had gone cold turkey after I was up to numerous pills at night. Just said, “Okay, this is the day I’m going to take them away, and do all of these CBT-I techniques.” Once I started to feel really sleepy even just after a week or so, that’s when I knew. Martin Reed: Wow. Jennifer B.: But it was definitely listening to the stories about others that really made me know that I could get better. So once I knew that, then I wasn’t trying to figure out a problem that really wasn’t there. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it can be so powerful to hear other people’s stories. That’s why, again, I’m so grateful for you coming on to share yours, because from person to person, insomnia is pretty much unique. The struggle is the hallmark of chronic insomnia is virtually same from person to person. So when we recognize our own experience of others, and we hear how people have transformed their relationship with sleep, and are sleeping better, regardless of how long they’ve been struggling with sleep, it can just be so inspiring and so motivational, and so reassuring. It can be that impetus to abandon all these efforts, and this search, and that ongoing detective work, and to just really focus attention on things that are helpful, things that do work. Jennifer B.: Right. Yeah, if I can just help one person to not have to use any type of sleeping pill, then it will all be worth it, for sure. Because I struggled for 17 years. Not that I never have struggles anymore. But I’m so much better, and I know that it’s going to get better. Martin Reed: Yeah, and I’m glad you mentioned that, because it is important to realize that there are always going to be some difficult nights, everyone has some difficult nights from time to time. It can become easy to have either unrealistic expectations, to believe that implementing some techniques will give us perfect sleep, 100% of our nights for the rest of our life. It can be easy to worry as soon as we have a difficult night that, “Uh-oh, the insomnia is back. Now I have to restart this search, maybe these techniques aren’t helpful.” Whereas the fact is we just had a difficult night, and everyone experiences them from time to time. It’s completely normal and to be expected. Jennifer B.: Right. I was going to tell you about a period of time earlier this year where I had a little bit of a setback. I was skiing, and I had torn my ACL, which is one of the major knee ligaments. It required a surgery. I tore it on January 15th. They like you to wait a while after the injury to let all of the swelling go down before you have the surgery. So I waited about a month after. Part of the recovery process is both after the injury and the initial days, you’re super tired, and your body is worn down. So it takes a while for energy to heal. So I was laying in my bed with my leg up, and I had to do the same thing in the post operative period too. Sorry, I’d have to elevate it. Jennifer B.: I couldn’t really turn, and I couldn’t really move around. I had to be in one spot, because it was braced. I’m usually a side sleeper or a stomach sleeper. I was kind of worried about this, especially because I had to take pain medication for about three days or so afterward. I was filled with a lot of negative emotions about the injury, and I was scared, and I thought, “How is this going to heal?” I know the techniques to fix that knee injury are different from my college soccer days, when people would have it. They were a lot more immobilized. But I was thinking about to the people who used, who did have that injury. It’s 20 years later, and then I had that injury. I was just anxious, even though the techniques were different, and they like to get you up and moving a little bit faster. Jennifer B.: I did go through a period of time where my sleep was definitely affected, until I didn’t have to brace it at night, and I didn’t have to wrap my leg at night. It did start to get better. But I did have some difficulty going to sleep, waking up early, and some of the things that I had before with the insomnia. But I reviewed some of the techniques, and re-implemented them. So I told my husband, I said, “I need some more boring books.” I took those ones about grass and farming back to the library. So he got about a dozen of them. Once I could get around without my crutches after my surgery, I would go downstairs and read the book, and it only took about four nights or so before I did the sleep deprivation technique again, and got back on track. Jennifer B.: I knew that it would get better. So even when I was filled with all these negative emotions, and negative thinking about the injury, and being mad at myself for slipping on the ice, and falling backward, and tearing my knee up, going back to my meditation, and then the sleep deprivation, getting out of bed, it worked. It worked very quickly.b ut I think the biggest thing was I knew it would work, because it worked before. I wasn’t so anxious about it. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think it’s amazing how our whole relationship with sleep changes once we go through that struggle, because I think for someone who has never struggled with sleep or has ever had any issue with sleep, if you said to them, “Okay, let’s say I need to have surgery, and I’m going through the recovery process, and I have some difficult nights. I experience some sleep disruption.” The person would probably say, “Well, of course, you’re going to have some sleep disruption. You had a big accident, you had some surgery, you have to recover. Everything, there is a lot of changes going on there.” Martin Reed: But when we struggle with sleep, we can become really concerned by that sleep disruption. Maybe see it as something else we have to deal with on top of our recovery, or it’s a sign that the insomnia is now coming back. The insomnia is seeing this opportunity to come back into our life, and disrupt our sleep again. But I think that the great thing about these techniques as you just touched upon is you know they work. So you know that during this period of recovery from surgery, or if we’re unwell, then we listen to our bodies, we rest, we recuperate, and then when we’re able to do so, if we are still struggling with sleep, then we know we can just reach into our metaphorical back pocket and just re-implement those techniques that have worked for us before. Jennifer B.: Right. Yeah. It definitely worked when I had my surgery, for sure. But I think knowing that it would work was a big part of it. Yeah, sure, it was miserable for those four days, and I got out my pen and paper, and wrote down my times. It only took a couple of nights of writing down my times, and getting out of bed when I wasn’t sleeping, and up by six o’clock every day. It didn’t take long. But it’s miserable for a few days, but it gets you back on track. So I’m very thankful for that. Martin Reed: Yeah. It’s a difficult surgery. I remember my wife actually had it, I think it was a little while back now, like 10 years ago. She had the ACL reconstruction. I know that it is a difficult recovery journey. So yeah, I trust that you’re doing better now. How is the knee? Jennifer B.: Yeah, I’m four months post-op now. It’s nice and strong, it doesn’t give out. I think part of the recovery has been being appreciative of my body, and my health, and I’ll have this motivation to be stronger going forward, and to avoid the negativity, because quite honestly, in the week or two after the injury, and then a week or two after the surgery, my thoughts were so negative, and it just seemed to affect the healing part of it. Jennifer B.: So that’s where my meditation came in to be calm, and not thing about the negative part, and think about the positive parts, like next ski season I’m going to be super strong, and this is never going to happen again, because I’m going to be so much stronger than I was going in. So not having those negative thoughts can be really helpful, just like they were for the insomnia, once I got rid of the negative thoughts, and thinking, “I’m never going to be able to go to sleep again.” Then I was able to go to sleep, once I didn’t have a lot of that negative thinking about it and it was true with my surgery recovery too. Martin Reed: I like how you linked the two, because I was just going to do that myself. It’s amazing how through adversity we can become stronger. We go through these really difficult periods of our life. But I think we can emerge from them stronger, change in a way, a more positive way from those experiences. Jennifer B.: Yes, definitely. Martin Reed: All right, Jennifer. Well, I really appreciate you setting aside some time and coming on today. I would like to fit in one last question, if you have the time for it. Jennifer B.: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Martin Reed: It’s a question I like to ask everyone at the end of these episodes. It’s this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening, and feels as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, and they just can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Jennifer B.: I would tell them to study the CBT-I, and learn all the techniques, become familiar with them, whether you believe it will work or not. Then give yourself a certain amount of time, say a week or two weeks, and follow the rules to a T. See how you do. That worked for me. Do the CBT-I for a week or two, and see how you do, because it didn’t take long once I knew it would work. Knowing that I wasn’t alone, and that other people have similar struggles was really helpful for me as well. Yeah, commit to it for a certain amount of time, and I think it’ll work. Martin Reed: That’s great. I think that’s a really positive note to end on. So thank you, again, so much, for coming onto the podcast, Jennifer. Jennifer B.: Yeah, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to The Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to implement evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques to improve your sleep but think you might need some additional support and guidance, I would love to help. There are two ways we can work together. First, you can get my online coaching course. This is the most popular option. My course combines sleep education with individualized coaching and is guaranteed to improve your sleep. You will learn new ways of thinking about sleep and implement better sleep habits over a period of eight weeks. This gives you time to build sleep confidence and notice results without feeling overwhelmed. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com/online. Martin Reed: I also offer a phone coaching package where we start with a one hour call. This can be voice only or video, your choice, and we come up with an initial two-week plan that will have you implementing cognitive and behavioral techniques that will lead to long term improvements in your sleep. You get unlimited email-based support and guidance for two weeks after the call along with a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) In 2019, Jovana experienced a night of no sleep whatsoever but she was confident that she would get some sleep the following night. However, the next night was just the same — Jovana didn’t get one minute of sleep. At this point, she started to panic, and her anxiety was further compounded by the fact she was a new mom. Jovana started to dread going to bed. She felt frustrated. She felt lonely. Fortunately, she found the Insomnia Coach YouTube channel and the Insomnia Coach podcast and started to realize that she was not alone and that her insomnia was not unusual or unique. Ultimately, Jovana stopped the endless sleep-related research and ongoing detective work. She stopped experimenting with medication and supplements. She started to remove herself from the process of sleep and began to accept that sleep cannot be controlled. At the same time, she committed to actions that helped her move toward the kind of life she wanted to live, even after difficult nights and even in the presence of difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions. As a result, Jovana regained confidence in her natural ability to sleep and is once again living the kind of life she wants to live. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that nobody needs to live with chronic insomnia and that evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques can help you enjoy better sleep for the rest of your life. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hello Jovana, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast. Jovana Mühle: My pleasure. Thank you, Martin. Martin Reed: So I’m going to start right at the beginning, just like I do with all my podcast guests. So can you just tell us when your sleep problems first began? And what do you think caused your initial issues with sleep? Jovana Mühle: So it first began, I think I know exactly the date, which is, it’s so weird, right? You remember some things very precisely, I think it was the 13th of December. And I think it was a weekend you can recall, and check if you’d want to check. I think it was 2019 13th of December. And it happened for me two nights in a row that I couldn’t sleep, so I really remember it’s the first time it began because before that, I would have bad nights of sleep but I wouldn’t panic. Jovana Mühle: And I wouldn’t react the way I did when it happened then in December, so basically, I had the feeling I couldn’t sleep. So I was laying down in my bed, I even tried to go to the couch, tried to sleep there, I just think nothing was happening. I didn’t sleep a minute, which never happened to me before. Because even if I had a bad night, and I couldn’t fall asleep, at some point and say, four or 5:00 AM, I would fall asleep, eventually. This didn’t happen then, and I didn’t know why, and then the night afterwards, I was sure I would sleep because I still had this belief sleep is natural. Jovana Mühle: It happens at some point, if you’re tired. It didn’t. And then it hit me really hard because I really thought there’s something wrong with me, there must be because I just had my baby a few months before. My son was born in August 2019. And I believed that maybe some, how do you say hormonal imbalance was the cause, or maybe the reason why I don’t know some. The thing is, I wasn’t informed very much about sleep. And all those things, even melatonin wasn’t a word for me. Jovana Mühle: I just thought there must be some chemical in your body, it allows you to sleep, and if you don’t have that, doesn’t work. So I really started thinking, I have a problem now. And it happened, so eventually, the third night I would sleep, but then I kind of I remember, I talked to some friends. And I was, can you imagine two nights in a row? Who had that? And I felt pretty lonely because I only had one friend who had it, and I think that’s one of the problems I had at this time is not knowing anyone who was going, or experiencing those things. Jovana Mühle: So I started to panic, I googled. And then, god, you can find anything on Google. So it happened a few nights after maybe just even a week afterwards, I couldn’t sleep again. And apparently, there was no apparent reason for me not to sleep because it’s not as if I did something different on that day. It’s not as if I overslept the days before. I couldn’t I had a baby, so it was, my baby was waking me up anyway, I was sleep deprived from my baby. So I thought this is not normal, something must be really bad with my health. Jovana Mühle: But the root cause, I think now, is not this hormonal thing. I really believe it was just stress, and insight, which was kind of there the whole time but I wasn’t really aware of it. And this is why when it happened again, I know now, but this is really in hindsight I couldn’t say that back then, but when it kept on happening, Christmas, I still had this, probably it was, it went on, basically until this year, beginning of this year, so kept on coming and happening. Jovana Mühle: And I couldn’t figure out what was the cause. But now, I would say I think it’s more stress related, and that my arousal system, as you told me is called, but this thing wouldn’t just come down. I wouldn’t calm down in the evening. And what’s interesting is, I don’t know why I wouldn’t notice that this was the cause, you know what I mean? In backwards now, I believe, god, it was so obvious, it was stress, but why would you think something’s wrong? Jovana Mühle: It’s very weird to me even now, to understand why somebody gets so lost with their thinking, it’s you take a wrong path, and then you. Martin Reed: It’s really easy to do. Did you ever have issues with sleep before that period of December 2019? Jovana Mühle: So I think I would say, but not a lot, I would say maybe, I don’t know, twice per year. So I would have a bad night where I would think about stuff, and then I noticed it’s already 2:00 AM, I’m still not sleeping. This is bad, I have to wake up in the morning, how I’m I going to do that, this kind of thing that. As I said four or five or even 6:00 Am, at some point, I would sleep. Eventually my brain would stop, think about those things, I guess, and then I would sleep. Jovana Mühle: So and this was rare, I wasn’t, I didn’t call myself insomniac. I didn’t even know really what this was, and then I started to pull myself I think insomniac now, when I had it a couple of times because it was just, I remember I was saying, but I don’t belong to those people, as if it’s something really bad. I really had this feeling, this is not me. And why is it happening to me, and I couldn’t figure it all out. And then I developed all the other problems like sleeping anxiety. Jovana Mühle: And I think this is the worst part because I already was anxious, because of my baby, being a new mom the whole thing. And then the sleep anxiety made it, this made my life horrible because I was dreading going to bed, even maybe just thinking about when the evening begins here, 6:00 PM already, should I go at 8:00 PM tonight to try to compensate? And this behavior began, wow. I was really I remember I was having, it was in my tummy because it’s somewhere in there to both stress ball, or something it’s holding you and I was really anxious. Jovana Mühle: Just thinking, Okay, I’m going to go to bed and it’s not going to work. And then what’s going to happen, I’m going to have another night without sleep. And wow, it’s frustrating. And the lonely part, feeling lonely, this component I think it was something that really wasn’t helping me because I figured when I started, when I discovered later on your podcast, your videos on YouTube, the whole class, everything. Jovana Mühle: This helped a lot and very fast. Just I know, I remember the first week I was watching at least five videos of yours, either hearing podcasts, or just some explanation videos, and I felt already a support just in knowing, okay, other people are having the same things, they are experiencing the same symptoms, or they are calling themselves Insomniac. So this thing, I think, is what I missed. And I’m sad I didn’t find this out before. Martin Reed: I think you touched on a great point about how we can just so easily get caught up in our thoughts. And a lot of it is to do with that especially that anxiety of what each night will bring. And I think something that some people listening to here will identify with, and I’m really glad you mentioned it was the fact that back in December 2019, apart from the fact that you have had a baby a few months before that, when those sleep issues kind of cropped up, there didn’t seem to be an obvious cause of them. Martin Reed: And that in itself can be quite concerning, right? And lead us down this rabbit hole of really starting to worry that maybe there’s a chemical imbalance, or there’s something uniquely wrong, we’ve lost that magical chemical, or that ability to sleep. And the reason I’m really glad you mentioned that is because sometimes there are obvious causes of sleep disruption, and that can be quite comforting. But sometimes there’s not and that can be where we can get caught up in our thoughts then. Martin Reed: But the fact of the matter is, it really doesn’t matter what the initial trigger of that sleep disruption is because we can eliminate those from our lives, there are always going to be some nights where we have difficult nights, sometimes it’s an obvious reason why, sometimes not. But it’s when we get caught up as a result of those difficult nights, and start to worry really start to feel anxious about what each night will bring, and start to modify our behaviors in response in a bit to try and protect our sleep, or to make sleep happen. Martin Reed: That’s when we can, the real problems can start, and that’s why it’s really helpful to kind of move away from trying to figure out the trigger, and instead just work on all those thoughts, and behaviors that can perpetuate the sleep disruption. Jovana Mühle: But even before I, no, after I googled obviously, first I googled, but then quite quickly I after a few months let’s say just after Christmas so it began December and I said I think 13th, so middle of December, and then I waited Christmas, it was bad. Everything was barging me. I think even already in January I went to a doctor, and okay obviously, not all doctors are bad, but her advice was pretty bad for me because the first thing she gave me was sleeping pills. Jovana Mühle: Obviously, not even the ones you buy over the counter, some herbs, or stuff, how do you call it it’s a drug I use, it’s like a Valerian. So not even that, she went full on, and gave me really a prescription of sleeping pills. And she was, no, if you take once per week, it’s fine. Now, obviously, this concept of I’m going to have one night of good sleep per week this is already triggering your anxiety because you think okay, I cannot do more than one because I’m going to be addicted, and it’s dangerous. Jovana Mühle: And I don’t know, I felt really, this was a bad idea to start with that. And the fact that she didn’t, she also said she didn’t want to test, or because I was mentioning my thought okay, probably hormonal imbalance, some chemicals, and magical chemical, it doesn’t work anymore. And she said, it’s very hard actually to, when you do a blood test, or you just want to go for a check. Jovana Mühle: She said, it’s quite hard to identify, where, if there is a problem really in the hormones, or something, she was also saying, there is a kind of no way to know precisely, if you really have this biological problem, or any chemical problem in your body. So this also left me okay, must be I don’t know, but it’s probably that it contributed to, it was just worse. Martin Reed: I think there’s two great points that you made there. The first and foremost is that we kind of sometimes can see the sleeping pills as being this kind of magical elixir, the solution to everything, but they can also come with their own issues, you said, If I’m only allowed to take them one night a week, does that mean that I’m just not going to sleep for the other six, then you’ve got this idea that sometimes they can reinforce this assumption, or this belief that we can’t sleep without some kind of external help, some external crutch. Martin Reed: And then just this drifting off into the detective work there’s some mystery going on, I’ve got to investigate it, is it chemicals? Is it hormones? Is it this? Or is it that, and often it’s that ongoing detective work that can really kind of trap us, and lead us down this slippery slope, and it can kind of just consume our lives, and we’re just spending every waking minute just thinking, or investigating what could be the problem here? Jovana Mühle: Exactly. Because for me, it wasn’t normal, that she would just prescribe those sleeping pills. I thought we need to figure out what’s the root cause, I wanted to know. So it really was you say, it really triggered my detective mode. And I kept on googling, and I thought maybe she has doesn’t know everything, I need to seek somebody who’s really professional, a generalist a doctor who really is just for sleep. But it’s funny how I didn’t think of this, how do you say TVCI? Martin Reed: CBT-I. Jovana Mühle: In French, it’s another way, but so the behavioral therapy, nobody mentioned that, she didn’t mention that. Martin Reed: That is a real shame, and your story’s really familiar, unfortunately, that we have this magical collection of techniques is cognitive and behavioral techniques, which is just a fancy way of saying, we can explore the thought processes that can perpetuate sleep disruption, and we can tackle the behaviors that we implement that can perpetuate sleep disruption. And when we take that kind of two pronged approach, it’s really helpful and really effective with chronic insomnia. Martin Reed: And it’s usually recommended as the first line treatment for chronic insomnia as well, but unfortunately, we have an issue where a lot of doctors just don’t know about it, often through no fault of their own, because the training just isn’t there most of the time. And also, we have an access problem. So even doctors that are familiar with the techniques, they don’t really have the time available to work through these techniques, one on one with their clients. Martin Reed: And there’s not many people they can refer these patients out to either so we have a real problem in terms of knowledge and accessibility of these techniques. And they’re not, we don’t need to shroud them in mystery. The techniques themselves are pretty straightforward, they can definitely be challenging to implement. But we don’t need to really ring fence access to them. They can be straightforward, people can implement them independently. Martin Reed: And if we can put all of our efforts into implementing those techniques instead of all the things that can lead us astray, this ongoing detective work, doing all that researching, or that doctor googling it can be so helpful and I like to emphasize this because we can get caught in this trap through no fault of our own, we can do everything right. We can go to the doctor, or we can look online, we can do our research but we can get trapped, or caught up because there’s a lack of information out there on the good stuff, the stuff that works and there’s a, we have challenges in terms of access to the good stuff as well. Martin Reed: So I think you touched upon the kind of issues that you were having it was, you would just be worrying about sleep all day long and then, we would normally expect let’s say if you didn’t have insomnia, we would normally expect after a night, or two maybe things would get back on track, you’d have those nights to catch up sleep, but it sounds that didn’t really happen for you. What were you finding was a kind of typical night? Was it issues just first falling asleep, or was it waking during the night finding it hard to go back to sleep? Or maybe it was both? Jovana Mühle: It was both. It started with the falling asleep, which I think was the main cause of my anxiety then because it was the worst part just dreading going to bed, but I also had and this happened, I didn’t know exactly when because it’s hard to say, because as I say I wasn’t sleeping through my night anyway because of my baby so even just breastfeeding, or just waking up to changed my baby, or something made me, sometimes I couldn’t fall back asleep, but I didn’t think about that until I had my insomnia, and then when this happened I could really notice. Jovana Mühle: I knew sometimes if my son would wake me up at two or 3:00 AM I wouldn’t sleep until the rest, even if I had fallen asleep first somehow, and I didn’t understand why falling back asleep it didn’t work. So I will wake up, do what I have to do and then go back to bed and then I just couldn’t sleep even if, maybe in this moment anxiety wasn’t there. So this is also why because I started to analyze because I was obviously, then conscious okay, I am stressed when I go to bed now obviously, I am stressed. Jovana Mühle: And I tried to do relaxation techniques, and stuff like that, and also mentioning this Valerian because I didn’t take those real sleeping pills for a long time because I was scared. And obviously didn’t work with the whole concept of I’m not sleeping five days, and I have one night what’s the point. So I quit this but then I tried to do a cure with Valerian, and this was kind of helping the time I was taking it because I felt less stressed I guess, so this is good because it’s worked on that but then the falling back asleep, falling back asleep when in the middle of the night this started not working, kind of really it was obviously well there’s something wrong now. Jovana Mühle: So this must be again another, you’re always kind of tried to analyze and to figure out what’s the root cause, and if something works the stressed part, it’s a bit relieved or diminished through this medication so then what’s next Why is still something wrong, god. I might not sleep at night, this is just, I don’t know, it was a very bad time so many bad memories of this, all the things I tried because it’s not the only thing after I finished three months of Valerian obviously, I went off and maybe, I think maybe for a week it was fine, kind of fine again. Jovana Mühle: But then I would eventually have another night where I didn’t sleep for a minute, and then I knew okay, so I’m back on this and I tried melatonin. I took it also, first of all, I figured this works. And I don’t know, in hindsight I don’t know why it worked because I don’t believe much in melatonin now after the whole experiences I had, but it did work, also maybe, how do you say, punctually so I would take it one time if I noticed I’m not falling asleep, and usually I do quite fast if I am falling asleep, it’s very fast. Jovana Mühle: So after 20 minutes, it’s not going to happen till, I think it’s more psychological effect they had on me, so I would just take it maybe it’s, by then it’s maybe 11 or 11:30, I would take it and still worked. And this is where I think it’s maybe a placebo effect it helped me to produce maybe my anxiety, or just it made me believe this thing could make me sleep. And I was on and off, and then again, I went to a naturopath, using naturopath, and she recommended not taking it the way I did because obviously it was already a couple months I was going this six months. Jovana Mühle: And she said, I think you need a cure because probably and this is where again, I fell back in my detective mode and whole, and she said, maybe you have a deficiency, or the pineal gland is not producing enough. Maybe you even have serotonin, a lack of serotonin, she was mentioning a lot of stuff there, and she didn’t really analyze or check it properly. Jovana Mühle: But she was saying, we don’t need to find out and run some tests, we can just take the cure you do again, three months of it, of melatonin every night, and she was melatonin too strong, you need to start with five milligrams, and you go on three months, and then you go back downwards. Basically, she felt this will teach my brain to produce it again, in case it wasn’t. And I remember I was thinking, god, we’re back again on something, and then I already knew I was dreading the moment I was to go off of it. Jovana Mühle: And I think it’s exactly at this point that I found out your podcasts, and your videos because I contacted you also and asked about this, how do I do that? Because I was I reduced from five and three, two, one. And then this is ridiculous, but I was taking even a quarter of one pill. So I reduced from one pill of one milligram, first, I did a half, then I had to cut into a quarter, and at the end I was still kind of biting off a little corner, this quarter of a pill and I was I’m so ridiculous, but I’m so thinking it’s I’m not going to sleep if I don’t take any. Jovana Mühle: So I don’t if I had this addictive profile people who are addicted to stuff easily, or just mentally thinking they need it. And, god, I couldn’t go on, and if I would, I wouldn’t sleep. So then I had my response to you. I had my confirmation. I’m not sleeping without melatonin. So what do I do now? Martin Reed: That whole, just listening to you describe that whole experience of sitting there and maybe we need to address the serotonin, maybe you need to have all this melatonin, maybe we need this and that, it made me start to feel anxious, just imagining myself in that situation. So I think you raised another great point there as well. And it’s when we end up taking supplements, or over the counter stuff, or anything, it could be prescription medication even, it can lead us to just it can reinforce this belief that we need something to generate sleep. Martin Reed: And then you said, especially if we taking it contingently, so for example, we’re not planning on taking anything tonight, we’re going to see how the night goes. And then if we do find that we’re struggling, then we might reach for whatever it is we’re taking, that can be problematic, too. Because first and foremost, we kind of setting up a little test for ourself, are we going to fall asleep pretty quickly, or are we going to fall back to sleep. So that in itself just keeps the brain a little bit more active, it has to monitor more for sleep and wakefulness, that can make sleep more difficult. Martin Reed: And then let’s say we do reach for whatever it is we’ve got close by, if we do then fall asleep, we’ve kind of reinforced this belief that that thing is generating sleep. If we don’t fall asleep easily, then we’re just reinforcing this belief that we’ve there’s something seriously wrong with us and that we’ve kind of lost the ability to sleep so really there’s no lasting positive outcome to these things. They can really be one of these one of these traps that we can get caught up in. Jovana Mühle: Interesting as you mentioned this thing of I say self monitoring, you kind of observing yourself, and trying to see if you are going to fall asleep, or not, but it happens unconsciously, right? And I didn’t know this was a thing as well. And I was trying, I remember, it happened also, maybe let’s say summer 2020. So December 2019 first time and then a few months later, I remember I had this for the first time when it’s not just this twinge normal ones you have when you fall asleep, it’s honestly my heart started racing so fast. Jovana Mühle: And I was feeling so alert, and stressed at the same time. I was relaxed the second before, so I didn’t know where this came from. I couldn’t, I didn’t know how to explain it, I remember I was saying this to some friends, the friend who had insomnia for example, and she didn’t have those things, but she also really like to talk much about insomnia because I think it was contributing to her anxiety as well, so I couldn’t I was lonely anyway. Jovana Mühle: And so I remember this feeling of just going to bed, even noticing this is the thing you’re noticing that you’re falling asleep, which normally doesn’t happen and then you have your heart, the stress, start racing and it wasn’t a physical twinge necessarily the thing you have sometimes, it was really, what’s happening my heart was pumping so fast. And luckily you describe it in your videos because this just a fact acknowledging the fact that this is a normal thing, or is a part of your brain wanting to be actually nice, and reward you, and tell you Okay, look, you’re falling asleep just after a few nights. Jovana Mühle: After I learned about this concept, self monitoring, I noticed it will fade off, it faded off and I didn’t have it anymore luckily. So because this was also a very bad thing, it would happen I don’t know maybe 15 times before I gave up even trying to sleep then because it was so uncomfortable. Martin Reed: They, I think in hindsight all these things, and we know once we have an explanation for them, it can be so reassuring, but before, we don’t know what we don’t know, right? And so if we don’t know what the explanation for these things is, it can just lead to more worry that there is something uniquely wrong, or that there’s something dangerous going on, or is really all just it’s just a manifestation it’s just a symptom of just heightened arousal, whether it’s thought based just thinking about sleeping pressure on ourselves to sleep monitoring for sleep. Martin Reed: Or the all the physical symptoms of heightened arousal, which is a racing heart feeling cold, feeling hot, sweaty all those things, these are all kind of normal reactions to heightened arousal it’s basically the body trying to protect us from what it sees as a threat, which is wakefulness, not falling asleep, the body can’t really differentiate between a real physical threat, and just kind of an imagined one, or just a mental threat or the reaction is the same so the body’s going to gearing us up to fight, or to run away, and that’s not really helpful when we want to be sitting there setting the stage for sleep. Jovana Mühle: Definitely, and not only that, I also noticed how I could fall asleep on the couch, and I was really sleepy, and you can fall asleep in the couch for a minute, and then I would go to my bedroom, and not even the part where you are fully suggest the fact that I would go into my bed, my mattress, this was already enough to make me fully awake, aroused I was just, I didn’t understand, and this is the other thing that helped understand when you explained the conditioning, or what do you call it. Jovana Mühle: And I think your brain has associating the fact that you’re not sleeping in your bed, so now we’re going to be awake in our bed. And it seems now, really in hindsight seems so obvious, but at back at the time it was I thought something was as you say uniquely wrong with me this is exactly the words I was using to say I have a unique problem something’s really wrong, and I’ll never find out. Martin Reed: I think it’s really helpful you just explaining all this, and just talking a bit about it because you said, it’s that worry that something is uniquely wrong with us, but the fact of the matter is insomnia from person to person is almost identical. So I just know from my own experience that so many people listening to this are going to be, my goodness, she is telling me, I’m hearing exactly what I’m experiencing and that in itself- Jovana Mühle: I found your videos, I was, god, I have this, finally. Martin Reed: That can be so reassuring, right? Just to realize that you’re not alone in what you’re going through isn’t unique, and that we don’t have to be looking for all the answers there. There are simple explanations to everything that you’re experiencing. See you mentioned I just wanted to go back really briefly about that, the trials, and tribulations of trying to come off that melatonin. You’re reducing the dose, you decided, because I remember you actually sent me an email about you really wanted to just get off this melatonin supplement. Martin Reed: And you would just go in smaller dose, tiny little nibble off the edge of the pill. But you went through that experience where when you had that night where there was no melatonin, then you have difficulty sleeping so it makes it really hard, right? So then have that confidence to maybe go a second night, or third night with no melatonin, it’s so much easier to just bring it back into our lives. So how did you shift away from that? How are you where we are today? Where I’m guessing maybe I’m assuming wrong you don’t have a big pile of melatonin pills right next to you. Jovana Mühle: I’m completely off since a few months, I think I stopped in February it was I guess I’m not sure exactly the months of this year. When so, there’s a thing I wasn’t paying much attention because it was, I was healing from this problem, and it was just happening smoothly. And then this when, counting exactly the days, but think I think it was beginning of the year. Jovana Mühle: And how I finally managed is just because I took a class honestly, so when I first I think I emailed you, or I was just I watched a YouTube videos, a few people interviews on your podcast. And this reduced the anxiety level of a lot, and I remember I would even watch before going to bed, sometimes twice the same, just to about this because it was a big problem of mine, I was really sure. Nobody has that, it’s unique, it’s very weird. Jovana Mühle: And just to have you say again, and again Okay, this is normal, this something that happens, and this reduced the stress level. So I remember, then I emailed you, and then you responded something very smart. It was what do you think, if you would go off melatonin now, and you wouldn’t you would force yourself to not sleep, now that you were recommending me to do that, suggesting I should note that, when you said, imagine just if you would force yourself not to sleep for five, or six nights in a row, do you think you still wouldn’t be able to sleep with your melatonin pill. Jovana Mühle: And I remembered this kind of triggered my motivation to really say, Okay, god, it’s so obvious just try now. And I think I kind of succeed, and maybe not the first time after this because I needed to kind of integrate this information, and probably rewatch a few videos saying always the same things, but just to accept those facts, and integrate them. And then I just, I think stress level was reduced enough, so actually, I wasn’t self monitoring me or my brain wasn’t monitoring. Jovana Mühle: And then I fell asleep, and it wasn’t enough after one night because I am, I think a very anxious person in general. So I was still think, okay, maybe one night, but I needed to have maybe a week of good nights to be able to build the self confidence. I think it didn’t happen after one success, it’s you need to have a lot of successes to just so that, there’s an overweight not this compared to what you’ve been experiencing since two years. So took a while, but I was watching, as I said, a couple of times, just for me, I need to have this, somebody telling me things a couple of times, so I integrate them quite well. Jovana Mühle: And then, it reassures me I’m not alone, or people are going through this, other people healed, or it’s not even healing, it’s, I guess, you understand things and you integrate them, and then you kind of you liberate yourself from all those beliefs. It’s not even you needed to heal, I didn’t need to heal from something, or maybe from a mental beliefs. But it’s not a healing that happened, it’s just some kind of integration of this information, and which would use this stress, anxiety, and slowly my brain stopped monitoring. Jovana Mühle: I think that’s what helped because it was about the falling asleep at the beginning of the night, but then in the middle of the night, sometimes I would have, again, where I couldn’t fall back to sleep, especially if it was early morning let’s say four, 5:00 AM for sure I would sleep anymore. But then again, this knowing you brought was reducing your sleep window and then I knew even before I tried to reduce it, I knew, okay, so it just means to me I’m rested, or it’s enough for tonight, and just this thing of accepting that maybe I don’t need to count eight hours on the clock to be, this helped because as I say, the first part of falling asleep was about having less stress, anxiety, not thinking of monitoring myself. Jovana Mühle: But this didn’t heal, or help the other problem immediately, which was fine because my worst nightmare was just going to bed. So when this was done, I was kind of okay, with sometimes just waking up at 4:00 AM or five and then I would lay in bed, but I wasn’t stressed anymore, I was, okay, maybe I’ll sleep maybe not at some point 6:00 AM, up, wake up anyway, or just and it’s fine. And we didn’t touch on that, but that was a big part of my understanding not needing to focus on those eight hours which was by the way the advice I got from the doctor because obviously, sleeping pills, but also sleep hygiene. Jovana Mühle: She informed me of all those things which just contributed to my anxiety again, and it wasn’t helping me so the fact that you kind of broke down all those elements of sleep hygiene was very good to just not be stressed if in the middle of night I’m not sleeping anymore, and then I tried eventually I remember I refused to do the sleep restriction because I thought since I still have a small child it’s waking me up at some point in the night, I’m not going to restrict too much because I didn’t know how to because sometimes I’ll be up anyway for twice in a night. Jovana Mühle: So it wasn’t eventually really going to help me, but at some point I realized Okay, if I’m always awake at five I could easily go maybe to sleep One hour later, and I’ll wake up maybe at say, you know what I mean? I did a bit of the sleep restriction, but not forcing it too much and eventually, I will still sleep maybe eight or nine hours because I’m quite tired in general and my child, I guess and then some nights I do sleep nine hours, and it’s fine, but some others I’m happy awake at five 5:30, and my day begins and it’s even a bonus time, so I’m not stressed about this part anymore for sure. Martin Reed: I think there’s kind of a common theme in everything that you’ve mentioned there, and I think it comes down to control, our desire to control sleep whether that’s through medication, or supplements, or trying to fall asleep trying to get eight hours of sleep, trying to sleep, and naturally wake up at say 7:00 AM instead of 5:00 AM. Martin Reed: Implementing all these different sleep hygiene techniques, or rituals all of these things really can just be distilled down into we’re trying to control sleep, and as you can probably tell just now looking back you’re able to do that it all just comes down to our desire to control sleep which is not helpful, it just increases arousal, makes sleep more difficult because sleep ultimately is something we can’t control, it’s a natural process and it’s when we try and get involved in the process that we tend to see sleep becoming more difficult than it needs to be. Jovana Mühle: Definitely and not to mention it, if I had a very bad night which means for me back then I wouldn’t sleep at all, I remember I would I was calling in sick, or not for work, but I just some things I had planned even with some friends, or nice stuff just easy easygoing things those ones I would cancel especially if it’s on the night following, on the evening following my bad night so I was no, I need to catch up on that sleep, so I go to bed extra early and it’s funny because I think from all the things that I’ve been through with insomnia where I’m now so I’m definitely I’m going to bed whatever time I want. Jovana Mühle: I’m not even thinking about it I’m falling asleep immediately as I always was before so I feel completely cured, but the only thing is sometimes I notice, and it’s interesting especially with the friend thing if I have friends over, or the dinner goes a bit longer, or something and sometimes I have thought about how I used to think before. So it’s maybe already 11:00 PM which is a bit late for me because I’m getting some time to get to bed, shower everything so I know I already think about it okay won’t be before midnight until I’m home showered, and in my bed. Jovana Mühle: And I still have this, in the morning I have I only have six hours a lot of sleep because I decided to have fun so I still have this little thing sometimes coming up in my mind and thinking okay, but usually what I do then, and I think it’s a very good recommendation for if you are cured, and you still have these problems at some point. I immediately think of everything I’ve learned Okay, so we’re not going to control sleep, we’re not going to try it will happen naturally and luckily I had I think enough months behind your success where it didn’t happen at all anymore. Jovana Mühle: So I kind of related that I don’t think that okay, I’m not controlling anything and look it works, it’s just natural, and just look repeating those things helped me. Martin Reed: I think what was really helpful that was just the way you were talking about, you’d sometimes call in sick after difficult nights, or you’d even cancel plans with friends. Those kinds of things are completely understandable why we would do them, but what typically then happens is, what are we doing instead. So let’s say for example, we call in sick from work, now we’re just kind of sitting at home, we don’t have any kind of distractions, what are we going to do, we’re going to start probably thinking, or worrying about sleep, maybe firing up Dr. Google again. Martin Reed: Maybe even just trying to take a nap, maybe we’re going to be more sedentary. All these things can kind of make us feel more fatigued, can generate more anxiety, more worry. And when we remove good stuff from our lives, those plans with friends, we reinforce this connection between difficult night equals difficult day. And definitely difficult nights can make the day is more difficult. But we also have quite a lot of control over the quality of our days independently of sleep. Often, what happens to us during the day, or what we do during the day, has more of an influence on the quality of our day, rather than this being completely 100, predetermined by how the night goes. Martin Reed: So if we’re able to still go into work, maybe or if we’re able to still go out with friends and carve out our days as normally as possible, can really help us come to that realization that a difficult night might not be the end of the world, it might not make the next day a complete disaster, there’s still an opportunity to be productive, or to have some good moments, or even just some, okay moments, after difficult nights, and then that in turn, maybe then we might put a little bit less pressure on ourselves to sleep, and feel be less likely to get caught up in all those anxious sleep related thoughts. Jovana Mühle: That’s not so easy, I have to say, because I remember, I think I can only now I can apply what you’re saying, and not cancel something, because I have this information in the background but if I would do that I tried sometimes I was okay, so good. I’m going anyway. And that evening it was COVID time anyway, so it wasn’t partying, or whatever it was more just staying up late at some friends, or having friends over. Jovana Mühle: And I remember I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I used to, you know what I mean? Even if I first have to do that, I will still have the anxiety because then you are really, this means I’m not going to bed before, maybe 1:00 AM, or which this is also the hard part, even if you shouldn’t cancel, how do you still enjoy something will bring some stress, and anxiety, and worrying. Martin Reed: Definitely, I think what can be helpful there is to kind of ask ourselves a question, and it will be something along the lines of, is this behavior helping me live the life I want to live? So for example, if you’re tempted to cancel those plans with friends, is canceling those plans helping you live the kind of life you want to live? If it is, then that’s fine. You don’t need to make, then cancel those plans. If it’s not, then why would you want to cancel those plans? Jovana Mühle: Okay, interesting. I think I’m going to keep this one because, as I say, sometimes even out by the end of an evening, or something, and if it’s late, I would still have those thoughts it’s late just this. I think this is so funny, because I think they’re really groups of people, either you’re born with this, or have to figure it. May be educate, get it from your parents, or from I was thinking did I get this from my parents? I think I did because I remember my dad was always saying, you need to go to bed. Jovana Mühle: I was maybe three, or four, or five I don’t know exactly because my memory is a bit low. But it was you need to go to sleep now because otherwise you’ll be very tired tomorrow. And I think this is something that it’s ingrained, or how do you say it’s a seed they put in you voluntarily, or unconsciously, but it can have this thing. It’s why I say there are two groups of people there was who don’t even look what time it is when they go to bed. And even if they need to wake up at five 6:00 AM very early to go to work. If there’s a nice movie, something on the TV or something they’re watching, it’s 2:00 AM they don’t care. Jovana Mühle: They just go to bed when it’s finished, you know what I mean? Those people I was never this type of people anyway, so I was always okay, so I have to allow myself to be able to sleep at least seven, eight hours. So this thing I think it comes on already from my childhood, or something either my parents kind of taught me somehow because I think, the next day if you don’t sleep enough, you’re it’s bad things are happening to you. I think this is why I say there are two groups of people, I really believe. Jovana Mühle: If you are already in this category of somebody who’s very conscious about how many hours you should sleep, and you kind of have this tendency to be worrying more about it. Martin Reed: Definitely and we see that in this common model that we have to describe the development of chronic insomnia, we call it the three P model. And so we start off with these predisposing factors, and some of them it might just be a different belief system about sleep we might just have place more importance on sleep, we might have been raised in a family where sleep was something that was talked about a lot, and maybe we were told that we must go to bed now, you must get out of bed now, you must get a certain amount of sleep. Martin Reed: We might have more anxiety, we might be really strong night owls, or really strong morning larks, so we might be more susceptible to some sleep disruption. So I think there are definitely some factors there that can predispose us, or kind of lift us closer to that bar of insomnia. And then we have I might as well talk about the last two now. So otherwise, people will ask me can we have the second P which is just the precipitating events, whatever triggered that temporary sleep disruption, that initial sleep disruption, it can be really hard to pinpoint that. Martin Reed: And it’s often not very helpful, because we can’t eliminate every potential source of sleep disruption from our lives. Normally, more than nine times out of 10, our sleep just gets right back on track, all by itself, but when it doesn’t, it’s almost always down to that last P, which is these perpetuating factors, which is all the changes to our thought processes around sleep, and all the behaviors that we completely understandably implement in a bid to improve our sleep, to control our sleep, to protect our sleep, that actually backfire on us, and make sleep more difficult. Martin Reed: Because all those thoughts and behaviors can end up lowering our natural sleep drive, our drive to sleep, they can disrupt our body clock, and they can lead to heightened arousal. And when we have high levels of arousal, we usually need to generate more sleep, try be awake for even longer to help overpower that arousal, and generate sleep. Jovana Mühle: It’s funny because I remember at some point I was, yes, obviously, not as some point. During the whole time, I was talking to my husband, and tried to get some support from him, which obviously wasn’t easy for him because he belongs to this other group of people. So no predisposition, nothing that triggered, he never had this insomnia thing, and he even because I was thinking at some point, okay, maybe this relaxation, or you have a lot of, what is the name, AMSR, those videos where people either cut through some sponge with a knife, very slowly, or something going on with some little pearls, or it can be sand. Jovana Mühle: I don’t know you usually see on those videos on YouTube fingers moving through some material. And it’s kind of relaxing to watch those but I remember, I was trying different things just to relax before bed. And I remember I asked him, do you know sleep is something special, I asked him, his face was he didn’t know what to tell. He was you just close your eyes and you go to bed. Jovana Mühle: And this also helped a little bit, to kind of realize what, or to validate what you were saying in your videos, being sleep is natural, and there is no need to control anything around it. And it happens naturally. And this was kind of a validation because for those kinds of people belonging to this other group, where they’re just naturally good sleeper they’re not doing anything. And it helped me to let go a bit of this wish to control everything because it wasn’t working obviously. Martin Reed: It can be I think, that can be really powerful is just asking someone who we know doesn’t have any issues with sleep. What’s your secret? What do you do to make sleep happen? And I get emails from people, how do I make myself fall asleep? What do I do when I get into bed to make sleep happen? We can, it’s that very act of trying that is the challenge, that is the obstacle to sleep happening, that the less we get involved, the easiest sleep becomes. Martin Reed: And I think that something else you mentioned, which I think is really worth emphasizing is that even today, sometimes if you’re out late, for example, you might think, if I stay out, this might mean I’ve only got six hours left to get sleep, or less time. And I think that the reason I emphasize that is because that’s normal and natural, it’s just the brain looking out for us, our brain is kind of hardwired, our brain is hardwired to protect us at the end of the day. Martin Reed: So it’s always going to consider what the worst possible scenario might be. It’s kind of we were living in a cave, and we see a bunch of people from a tribe that we didn’t know way off in the distance, the brain, the person that passed on their genes successfully, their brain told them don’t go down there, we don’t know those people stay in the cave. The brain of the person that didn’t get to pass down their genes probably said, go down. We don’t know who those people are, let’s go say hi to them, went down there probably got boiled in a big cauldron and eaten. Martin Reed: So our brain is, we are all here today, every single one of us because our brain is really cautious. It wants to give us the worst possible outcome in our mind because that’s its protection mechanism. It’s always going to be doom and gloom priority number one, that’s how it protects us. So we don’t want to prevent that from happening. We don’t want to try and push those thoughts away, or fight them or avoid them because it’s futile. It’s just our brain trying to protect us, we’re always going to have thoughts, some of them are going to be happy nice thoughts, some of them are going to be unpleasant thoughts, but they are just thoughts, so we don’t have to react to them. Martin Reed: We don’t have to fight them. We don’t have to try and avoid them. Sometimes it’s helpful to just recognize there’s that thought, I’m only going to have five hours to get to sleep tonight, but here I am out doing things that are important to me, that are meaningful to me, that are enriching my life. Maybe that’s worth more than getting an extra hour, or two of sleep tonight. Jovana Mühle: This is good. I’m going to keep this for me for if it helps again because I was thinking if those thoughts begin, and you engage in this, when you’re really, I was thinking, Okay, anxiety might come back. And this is when I’ll be again maybe self monitoring my sleep, or something this. So it’s good to say this, and emphasize on this that you should not engage, you just acknowledge Okay, this is a thought and not try to too much think, okay. Jovana Mühle: So anxieties may be coming back, or maybe Okay, I’m going to be aroused now, as soon as I go to bed. My arousal system would be not aroused, you know what I mean. My arousal system will go on, and I will all these symptoms we usually have. So this is why I think this is a very difficult part in not perpetuating your problem even if it happens once in a while here and there, just I think what you said, not engaging too much, with this thought just acknowledging it. Because what I do now, obviously, I do have sometimes trouble falling asleep, but it’s very rare, it may be happen only twice in the last couple of months. Jovana Mühle: And what I did is when I noticed, and this is also something I had from your online course, was if you feel bad, if you’re anxious, or angry, or even frustrated, any bad emotion you might have while you are lying in bed, then you should get out of it. And this is what I do, and I practicing this, from where I am now, this is great. So I would just stand up, go out of my bedroom, go down, maybe even watch some TV, which also was interesting because from a sleep hygiene, you should not do that, or they say you shouldn’t. But actually, when you are an insomniac are struggling with so many issues, you just do that, and your distress and you won’t think about your insomnia which is your main problem I think. Jovana Mühle: So I go down in the living room, and I would watch maybe some TV, or even on my phone I actually don’t read I do something else. I have a book there so if it happens, I could just read, and usually just falling asleep there will solve my problem meaning I will wake up maybe after an hour, or two because I know either the TV is still on, or my light is on, and my book is on me, or you know what I mean? I just fall asleep for, slept a few hours. And then this is something I cannot explain I think it’s due to the fact that I’m relaxed then I go back to bed because I think okay, it’s more comfortable than my couch. Jovana Mühle: So I do this, I go back even if it’s already 4:00 AM, or something, I go back, and I always fall back asleep. And I’m thinking, wow, this is interesting. This shows just the fact that if you’re thinking about even your stress, and this pressure you’re putting on yourself doesn’t work, just moving up, even walking, going up the stairs, where you think I might be wide awake now. Not at all. I think I fall asleep in a second, and this is another validation for me that it’s just natural, and you really don’t need to think about it, control it, just let go of all those things you’re doing. Jovana Mühle: Going back to my bedroom, the stress is gone. Because I know, because there’s this kind of knowing, I can sleep my body can do that. So actually, I’m just going to go back and it works. Martin Reed: Exactly, if you can sleep on the couch, then you can sleep anywhere. So it shows that you can sleep if you’re one of these people that you recognize you’ve got that really high conditioned arousal, where you seem to be able to sleep on the couch, but you can’t sleep in bed essentially, you’re into bed wide awake again. Well, this just shows that maybe it’s an arousal, an anxiety issue, rather than a sleep issue, because after all, you are recognizing that you’re able to sleep somewhere else. Martin Reed: And so it shows that you can sleep and everyone can sleep as long as you’ve been awake for long enough. So, I think that’s helpful. And just having that plan in place, we said we don’t have to react to all these thoughts that race through our mind. They can be unpleasant, they can make us feel uncomfortable, but we can also have a plan in place. So if being in bed really starts to feel unpleasant we’re tossing and turning. We just don’t feel good, conditions don’t feel right for sleep. Then we might as well get out of bed and just do anything that might make being awake a bit more pleasant compared to staying in bed, and struggling. Martin Reed: And that could involve watching TV, might involve reading doesn’t really matter too much what we do because our goal isn’t to make sleep happen, because we can’t control sleep, it’s just to make being awake, a bit more pleasant. But it comes with that bonus that we’re not reinforcing that conditioned arousal, we’re not reinforcing that association, or that idea that the bed is an awful place to be because we’re getting out of bed whenever it doesn’t feel good to be in bed. And that can be really helpful. Martin Reed: So I know I’ve taken a lot of your time, and I’m really grateful so I’m just going to kind of get to the last question which is the one that I like to ask everyone, and that’s this if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and feel as though they’ve tried everything that beyond health, they can’t do anything to improve their sleep. What would you tell them? Jovana Mühle: Watch this podcast, watch the videos I would tell them, honestly I would tell them to get informed about all the things we just mentioned in this episode, but get informed about how sleep is natural, how it happens naturally, how they, this knowledge it seems so obvious to some people, and you need to go back it’s something so simple and obviously to go back to this. So I would honestly try your course which is great. Jovana Mühle: This is what I thought because I was already anticipating what will happen if this doesn’t work, we kind of thinking one step forward and I was thinking okay, so if the online insomnia coach doesn’t help me, I’ll get someone in person, I thought maybe this I need this contact, this is the next step. So maybe if you feel online stuff don’t really help you then definitely do the CBT-I therapy, the cognitive therapy, I would do this. Jovana Mühle: And it’s difficult to say because if you had this since your whole life, it’s also hard I can understand how hard it is to imagine a different way of living, or being regards to your sleep because for me I could relate to how it was before it happened two, or three years before that. So I had the goal of kind of going back to this detached, just relaxed person I was regarding sleep, and if there is where maybe I don’t know if you’re really struggling since you’re a kid, or a teenager, or something. I guess it’s really important to have somebody to help you, or follow you, a coach, you basically with this, and to know that you’re not alone. Jovana Mühle: I would say this is one really important thing, knowing that there are other people struggling, and maybe even people who are not willing to talk about this because they know that this triggers them, or contributes to their own anxiety, and which is something I couldn’t understand, and now I do a bit. And I think this is important if you have those people so find someone else maybe who can talk to you about this, and use those platforms. You also have I think one, I didn’t use this one, but I think there’s a forum, or something where you can also ask questions, and talk to other people, and have this I think this helps to feel supported to not be lonely. And to be reminded you’re not having a uniquely wrong issue. Jovana Mühle: It’s something, insomnia is very similar, and it’s natural, this word, it happens natural sleep happens naturally, everybody can sleep this is you’ve been printed out I was thinking, also I did this on my fridge you can print it out somewhere, put it in there have a constant reminder of those things until you integrate them when you’re breathing, your body you really have the knowing from the inside, not just somebody telling you need to kind of really integrate this information. Jovana Mühle: And I think then you’re really cured because I think everybody can be cured. It’s obviously everybody can sleep, it’s natural. It’s funny, I wish I had all this information when it started because I would have saved a lot of money buying my pills, and everything I did consultations, and would have been sleeping better earlier. So don’t waste your time trying other things just. Martin Reed: I think I don’t, that’s something I hear a lot is I wish I’d found out about all of this sooner. It’s very common that people feel that way. And obviously it’s understandable but I think the great thing is, the past is the past, but what matters is the present, and now you do know all these techniques. And just talking to you, you can just tell that your whole relationship with sleep has just changed, but if sleep issues ever happen again in the future, you’re in a completely different place now. Martin Reed: You know way more about sleep, you know specific techniques that have proven to be helpful, you know you can just pull them out of your back pocket, and just implement them again if needed. So maybe you’ve come out of this even stronger, you’re now more resilient, more confident. So maybe in a way maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but maybe there is even a glimmer of a silver lining to this whole experience. Jovana Mühle: I believe in that I’m working actually as a healer, energetic work, and stuff this. And I do believe that all experiences have actually a good purpose for us. We learn something from it, even the bad stuff, so I would take away, this is definitely. Jovana Mühle: And even just by talking to some friends, I didn’t know they had this, and I recommended also your podcasts, and videos, and everything. And I think even just being able to help other people who are maybe not talking, but still, 9:00 PM thinking I need to go to bed, and everything’s a bit stressed around this bedtime thing there’s helping others. Martin Reed: That’s great. All right, well, I think that’s a great note to end on, so thanks again for being such a great guest, and sharing your experience, it’s been great to talk to you, Jovana. Jovana Mühle: Thank you for having me. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to The Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to implement evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques to improve your sleep but think you might need some additional support and guidance, I would love to help. There are two ways we can work together. First, you can get my online coaching course. This is the most popular option. My course combines sleep education with individualized coaching and is guaranteed to improve your sleep. You will learn new ways of thinking about sleep and implement better sleep habits over a period of eight weeks. This gives you time to build sleep confidence and notice results without feeling overwhelmed. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com/online. Martin Reed: I also offer a phone coaching package where we start with a one hour call. This can be voice only or video, your choice, and we come up with an initial two-week plan that will have you implementing cognitive and behavioral techniques that will lead to long term improvements in your sleep. You get unlimited email-based support and guidance for two weeks after the call along with a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) Cindy developed postpartum depression shortly after her daughter was born and was prescribed medication to help her sleep. The medication seemed to work at first but Cindy soon found that it wasn’t helping and this led to more anxiety and more sleep difficulties. Cindy thought that her brain was broken and started to implement lots of different safety behaviors in a bid to get her sleep back on track. After trying to eliminate all the possible causes of her insomnia, Cindy was continuing to find sleep difficult. Fortunately, Cindy realized that it was all the effort she was putting into sleep and all the behaviors she was implementing in a bid to protect her sleep and create perfect conditions for sleep that were keeping her insomnia alive. Cindy started to accept the possibility of nighttime wakefulness and the reality of nighttime wakefulness when it occurred. She took steps to make nighttime wakefulness more pleasant and took comfort in the fact that nights of less sleep build sleep drive and increase the likelihood of sleep on subsequent nights. Ultimately, Cindy stopped putting pressure on herself to sleep. She stopped striving for sleep, she stopped putting effort into sleep, she stopped trying to fight or avoid sleep-related anxiety, and she started to recognize that all the anxious thoughts produced by her brain were just that — thoughts. Nothing more and nothing less. Today, Cindy doesn’t take any sleep medication and she is sleeping well. Perhaps one of the biggest insights she shared is that she no longer uses sleep itself as a measure of her success. In Cindy’s words, it’s our relationship with sleep that is the true measure of success. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that nobody needs to live with chronic insomnia and that evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques can help you enjoy better sleep for the rest of your life. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Cindy. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come onto the podcast. Cindy Xia: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me here. Martin Reed: It is great to have you on. I’m really excited for everything that we’re going to be talking about. Let’s start at the beginning. Can you just tell us a little bit about when your sleep problems first began, and what you feel caused those initial issues with sleep? Cindy Xia: So it started when I had Feena in October last year. And I had a great pregnancy, a great birth. I felt really good. Feena was actually a pretty good baby. And for the first few days I was actually still doing okay. I was really sleep deprived from looking after her, but I had no problems just passing out whenever I had the chance. And then around a couple of days in, I just remembered feeling really off, really jittery and just feeling like I couldn’t switch off. And now I think back, it was sort of probably the beginning of my postpartum depression, but I felt it as anxiety. And so it sort of built and built and built to the point where I couldn’t sleep anyway. And then around nine days postpartum, I had a really scary mental health crisis, where I think the cumulative effects of the sleep deprivation actually made me hallucinate. And I had this really scary… Cindy Xia: I thought it was a psychotic episode. I’m not sure what it was. But I was lying in my bed, trying to nap. And for some reason I thought my whole house was floating in the clouds. I wasn’t dreaming, I believed it. And I just remember thinking, “Oh no, something’s wrong with me. I need to get help.” So then anyway, long story short, the crisis team was called. They came in and then they looked at me and they said, “Well, you’re not psychotic.” And I was like, “Oh, thank goodness.” And they said, “But you really, really, really need to sleep, because sleep deprivation is torture, and it can drive people crazy. You have to sleep. So let your mum look after your baby for the night. Here’s some sleeping pills. Go and sleep for eight hours and go.” Cindy Xia: So I was very relieved. I was just like, “Oh, it’s just sleep. Easy. I’m super tired.” And so that night it was fine, I was knocked out for eight hours and I felt good the next day. And then I noticed something over time. I started to notice that it was harder and harder to fall asleep at night, even though I knew my baby was with my mum, I knew that she was okay and that they were giving me quetiapine for sleep. And I knew that the amount of quetiapine I was taking, it should be enough to knock me up. But I think there was one night where it didn’t knock me out, and I was so freaked out. I thought, “Oh my gosh, something is happening in my brain. Why can’t I sleep even with these drugs?” Cindy Xia: Yeah. And then it got to the point where I think it was also the anxiety from my hormones, it was also making it very hard to sleep as well. So yeah, it was pretty traumatizing. And it got to the point where Feena was actually sleeping quite well. She would sleep four or five hour blocks quite early on. And the big irony was that she was sleeping, but I wasn’t sleeping. It was quite fun. So yeah, that’s how it started. It started with a mental health crisis. Martin Reed: Yeah. So do you feel that part of the problem was maybe you just weren’t expecting sleep disruption, or maybe you were expecting some sleep disruption, but when it was combined with everything else that was going on, it just kind of made the whole reaction just even more intense? Cindy Xia: Yeah, I think I wasn’t expecting any sleep disruption, at least not in the form of insomnia. Because I had expected to be sleep deprived because everyone tells you a baby… well, you don’t even sleep when you have a baby. If you don’t sleep, you don’t wake up. So I expected that, but I just thought if you’re sleep deprived, you will sleep so much easier. So I thought I would have no problem sleeping. And I actually had no problem sleeping in the beginning when I was still feeling quite good, but I did not expect to be so wired. That’s how I felt tired but wired in the early days. Cindy Xia: Again, I think that was hormonal. And I don’t think I could’ve slept even if I tried. But back then, it just made me panic because I thought the insomnia was… Basically, I just thought my brain was broken. And then what was scary was that even after being Feena was sleeping well, and even after my hormones seemed to be getting better, that insomnia actually stuck around. Yeah, that’s when I knew I actually had a bit of a problem. Martin Reed: Yeah. So I think a lot of people listen to this are just going to identify with a lot of what you said, regardless of if they’re new parents or not, especially that phrase you used where we can feel tired, but wired. We really feel that strong sense of fatigue or sleepiness, but we’re just so wired, it seems to be really difficult to sleep. Martin Reed: So with that in mind, I think many people will probably also recognize that, well, there’s a clear and obvious trigger for some sleep disruption here, the new baby. Most of the time when we experience some sleep disruption, our sleep just gets back on track all by itself once we’ve adapted to whatever that trigger is, or got used to it, or we’ve adapted. But in your case, it didn’t. Like you said, Feena started to sleep well, but you were still struggling, even though that wasn’t the obvious trigger or the obvious factor now for that sleep disruption. So with that in mind, what do you think it was? Why do you think you continue to struggle with sleep even when your daughter was clearly no longer the primary cause of that sleep disruption? Cindy Xia: I think because it was the first time in my life that I struggled with sleep in this way, because in the past I was a pretty good sleeper, but I would not be able to sleep if, say I was sharing a room with someone. That was my thing. I just couldn’t share a room, and I would know I would have a bad night. But I knew if I could sleep alone, I would be fine because I didn’t feel any pressure. But it was like after having Feena and after going through all that craziness, it was almost like that sleeplessness had crept into even when I was sleeping alone. And I felt like I had no more safety behaviors to go back into. Because I was sleeping alone, my baby was in a different room. She was with my mum. And that was really frightening, because I thought, “Well, in the past if I had problems sleeping, I could just move to a different room or tell that person to go away. But now I can’t sleep and I don’t know why. I don’t know why I can’t sleep, and I don’t know what to do about it.” So I guess it was a sense of helplessness and not knowing why this was happening. Martin Reed: Yeah. So you mentioned that in the short term you were on sleeping pills, found them helpful at first, but then it felt like they just stopped working. I think people will probably identify with that as well, that experience. What kind of other things did you try at that point in a bid to improve your sleep? Cindy Xia: Quite a few things. So the first thing was, I thought that my baby was a trigger for my sleeplessness. So I thought, “Okay. I can’t keep her in the same room, because I’m probably waking up to all the noises,” so that’s why I moved her out of the room. It was coming to summer when Feena was a newborn, so it was getting quite warm. And so I thought, “Okay, I read that elevated body temperatures makes it harder to sleep.” So I thought, “Okay, I’m going to sleep, drag my mattress downstairs under the air-con, blast it at 20 degrees and try to sleep.” I thought… Oh, there were loads of things. I thought, “Oh, blue light is bad. Don’t use your phone after dark. Don’t even look at it. Don’t even touch it. Don’t even think about it. Don’t drink tea,” even though I water down my tea like five times before I drink it, but, “Don’t drink tea because that bit of caffeine is going to keep you up for five hours.” So I tried to eliminate all the possible causes of sleeplessness, basically. It didn’t work. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think a lot of what you’ve described there are what we consider these sleep hygiene techniques or rules, whatever you want to call them. And I think people with insomnia are experts on sleep hygiene. They’re probably the most hygienic sleepers are people struggling with sleep that you could ever imagine. And I really think that sleep hygiene, especially by itself, just really isn’t helpful for people with insomnia, because I think it just draws even more attention on sleep, and leads us to put in more pressure on ourselves to sleep. And now we have this huge list of rituals. So not only are we struggling to sleep and desperate for sleep, we now feel that we have to add these 10 different rituals onto our days and our nights. Cindy Xia: Yes. And if one of the conditions is not quite right, then that adds more anxiety to it as well. Martin Reed: Yeah, exactly. So I think you mentioned that you found this one specific video on the YouTube channel, that you found really helpful. And it’s kind of like your first step, that light bulb moment. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that video is about, and how you identified with it, and why you found it helpful? Cindy Xia: Yeah. So as with many people struggling with sleep, I scoured Dr. Google and Dr. YouTube, and looked everywhere. And a lot of the results were just sleep hygiene things. And I just thought, “I’m trying all these things, it’s not really working.” And then I came across your channel. I’m not sure exactly what terms I looked up, probably how to fall asleep or something, quick, without medication. And I came across your video, which was Letting Go of Sleep Efforts and Safety Behaviors. And I don’t know, there was something about it that was just so counterintuitive to everything that I was reading online, because everything I was reading online was just more sleep efforts, basically. But your one was the complete opposite, saying don’t even try. In fact, those things would actually make you insomnia worse. And the only thing that can help you sleep is just staying awake long enough and just being calm enough before sleep, basically. And I just thought, “Oh great. This is finally… I don’t have to do anything. I’m good at doing that.” So I just decided to do nothing. And that first night, actually, I slept straight away that first night. And it was really good. Martin Reed: Yeah. Yeah, I think that is a big thing. And I think it’s almost extension of this idea of the sleep hygiene rituals. They draw more attention to sleep. We’re doing all of these things in an attempt to make sleep happen, but at the end of the day, sleep is something we can’t control. And it’s often when we try and control it, when we try and put all that effort into sleep, that sleep becomes more difficult or more elusive. So if we can focus our attention on maybe just creating good conditions for sleep to occur, like only going to bed when we really feel sleepy enough for asleep, being active during the day, as much as we can. Those kinds of things are way more helpful than trying to directly control sleep or directly put effort into sleep, because that really just makes things more difficult. Cindy Xia: Doesn’t work at all. Martin Reed: But at the same time, I think it is important to emphasize that it’s completely understandable why we would do all these things, because everything in life responds positively to effort, sleep is the exception to that rule. We aren’t to know that until we put all this effort in and it kind of backfires on us. So I’m really keen to just get the message out there that if you do identify yourself as being in this struggle, putting all this effort into sleep, and you’re finding that nothing’s improving, that’s understandable. It doesn’t mean that there’s something seriously wrong with you. It’s not you, it doesn’t mean you’ve got this different, more virulent strain of insomnia. It’s all completely understandable and predictable why you’re still struggling. And it’s probably because you’re caught up in that struggle. So if we can shift away from that, that’s often when we start to notice those improvements. Cindy Xia: Yes. And I think, actually, insomnia is actually really common. And I would be surprised if a lot of people don’t have it, because I think it’s a sign that you are human. We naturally worry about things, and we naturally try to protect ourselves against or react against something that is frightening us, or something that seems out of our control. So I think, yeah, instead of thinking something’s wrong with me to have insomnia, I think that’s normal. Well, it’s not ideal, but it’s not surprising. Martin Reed: Yeah, definitely. And I think there’s also a difference too, between temporary more short-term sleep disruption, because that is definitely a part of life. There’s nothing we can do to prevent difficult nights or sleepless nights. That’s just part of being human. And that is a difference between what we consider to be chronic insomnia, the longer term problem. That longer term chronic insomnia is typified by whatever that initial trigger was, is probably not even present anymore. Now our issue is more to do with a change to how we think about sleep, and how we react to our thoughts, and any behaviors we have implemented in an attempt to understandably improve our sleep, but have backfired and made conditions worse for sleep. A common example would just be spending huge amounts of time in bed to generate more sleep, but really all we end up doing is just generating more wakefulness. Cindy Xia: Yes. Yes. I was doing a bit of that in the beginning, because when you have a child sleep becomes more valuable than gold, which there’s your sleep pressure right there. And so whenever she slept at night, whether it’s at 10:00, or at 9:00, or 11:00, I’ll be like, “Okay. Right. It’s time for me to go to bed and make the most of this.” But actually normally, because I’m normally a night owl and I normally sleep at quite atrocious hours, like 1:00, or 2:00, or 3:00. So my circadian rhythm was already not helping at the same time. Martin Reed: Yeah. So one thing you touched upon is you saw this video and then it kind of clicked about putting effort into sleep, and safety behaviors, doing things to try and protect our sleep. And I think you mentioned that you just became more accepting of being awake at night. You just learned to be okay with having difficult nights, okay with feeling the effects of a night of insomnia during the day. This is a big challenge faced by people with insomnia. How do we accept this? How do we become okay with difficult nights? Martin Reed: So I’m really keen to hear your thoughts on that. How were you able to kind of recondition yourself to be accepting of wakefulness, and not see sleep as something you had to battle with? Cindy Xia: It’s a process. It does not happen overnight. And the first night that I saw your video, I slept while there not because I was obviously very tired. But the process of accepting wakefulness for me took many months, I think, because it’s one thing to understand it intellectually and go, “Oh yeah, that makes sense. I just have to accept it.” And it’s another thing for your body and your mind to follow, because if you’ve been primed to fear something, it’s very hard to uncondition it. It’s possible, but it’s very, very hard. Cindy Xia: So for me, I focused a lot on number one, was just realizing that I don’t have to sleep, because in the past, when I was sleeping on my own, and I could sleep whenever, I never thought, “Oh, I’m going to sleep now,” when I go to bed. I always thought, “Oh, I’m just going to lie here, think about a few things, and look at my phone, and close my eyes.” And I never thought, “I’m going to try to sleep. I’m going to try to sleep.” And I always remembered that back then, I would think, “If I can’t sleep, I’m just going to get up and read a book.” I’ve always believed this my whole life, I was going to do that. Cindy Xia: But obviously, when I had a baby, I just thought, “I feel like reading a book would be wasting this precious sleep time.” But then realizing that actually, I can just get up and read a book. I’m not tied to this bed. No one is watching me. It doesn’t matter. So that kind of alleviated some of the pressure to try to sleep when I’m lying there. And the other thing was, I guess, dealing with the brain-deadness the next day. I think what really helped was when I was watching your videos, you talked about sleep drive. And firstly, that’s a great name for being completely trashed, that’s basically how I felt. I just think, “I have great sleep drive.” And so it just turned that feeling into a positive thing rather than something that’s negative. Cindy Xia: It made me think like, “Oh, it’s okay. I’m just collecting sleep drive, so tomorrow I could sleep extra well. And if not tomorrow night, then the next night. It’s fine.” And also, because I had been sleep deprived to the point of hallucination in the early days, and I had recovered from that, I guess I wasn’t as… Well, I was afraid of that, but I also knew oh, it’s fine. I’m probably not going to get as bad as that, so it’s okay. I mean, even if I hallucinate again, it’s okay. I guess, because I had hit rock bottom, so I just was more accepting, being tired was fine. So it was definitely a process. It takes a lot of time to decondition yourself. And I think the first time when it started to get better was when I had those sleepless nights, but it wasn’t that bad. I felt quite like, oh. I got up, I did a couple of things, went back to bed. Got up, and I was like, “Oh, I feel fine.” Cindy Xia: So then the next night I thought, “Oh, if I have one of those nights again, I’ll be all right.” And so I think it was that little moment when I thought, “I will be okay,” was when I started to be more accepting. Martin Reed: Yeah, why do you feel that those sleepless nights felt a little bit better? Do you think it was just a change in your reaction to them or your relationship with them? Or was it because you were doing different things, like instead of struggling, you were getting out of bed and reading a book or something like that? Why do you feel like those sleepless nights started to feel better? Cindy Xia: I think because, firstly, I started to realize that I was able to sleep. That’s the first thing, and I wasn’t just lying there wondering why my brain’s broken. And the second thing was, I just thought, “It’s just a matter of time. It might not be tonight, it could be tomorrow night.” So I think just realizing that everything was going to be okay and that there is a way out of this and I just needed to give it time. And right now, tonight might not be a night where I get lots of sleep, and that is okay. And just having things to do actually really helps. Because it’s super boring just lying there. I would much rather go on Facebook for five hours at night, than staring at the ceiling and wondering why I can’t sleep. So yeah, it was just a combination of lots of things. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think that understanding the concept of sleep drive, like you touched upon, can be so helpful. All we mean by sleep drive, for people not familiar with it, is the longer we’re awake for, the stronger that pressure to sleep becomes. None of us can stay awake indefinitely, we’ll always sleep in the end. Martin Reed: When we’re struggling with insomnia, the brain can play tricks on us, right? We can have a really difficult night, and then we start to really become concerned that the next night is going to be really difficult too. Whereas the reality is after a really difficult night, the chances actually start to tip in our favor that the next night or the night after that will be a little bit better, because of that accumulation of sleep drive, because there’s been less sleep, more wakefulness, it increases the likelihood of sleep on subsequent nights. And that in itself, just understanding that concept can be really reassuring, just as you touched upon. Cindy Xia: Yes. Yes. Martin Reed: Something else I really liked was how you said, “In the past, when I went to bed, I never went to the bed and thought, okay, now I’ve got to fall asleep.” But yet, when we’re struggling with sleep, we start to put that pressure on ourselves, right? Cindy Xia: Yep. Martin Reed: And it’s like if a client asks me, “What do I do to make myself fall asleep when I get into bed?” And it’s kind of like, well, how about you just go and ask someone who sleeps really well and ask them what they do to fall asleep. And you’ll probably just get a blank stare, because the very process of falling asleep involves no attempts or no effort to fall asleep. And if we can recognize that we’re trying, that could be part of the problem. So I think that was really, really interesting the way you mentioned that. And it’s kind of ironic because I think deep down, we all know this. If we have a history of being able to sleep well in the past, we can remember that this was never anything I put effort into or thought into, so why am I doing it now? Martin Reed: And just so much of our thought processes and our behaviors change. Like you touched upon in the past, “I would just read a book if sleep wasn’t happening,” but then your mindset changes. “I don’t want to read a book, because that might take sleep away from me.” Cindy Xia: Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Absolutely. Martin Reed: Everything just changes. So sometimes it can be helpful to just try and identify all these changes we might’ve made, and see if we might be able to just pick away at them and start to undo them, and see what kind of effect that might have on our sleep. Cindy Xia: Yes, absolutely. And I remember in the early days of insomnia land, I would even try to monitor when I would fall asleep. I would think, “Oh, if my leg jerks once, it means I’m getting there.” Or if I start getting those dreamy thoughts, I go, “Oh, I’m nearly there.” And obviously, that would wake me up on it. And I’d go, “Darn it. I was so close. So close.” And whenever I had a dream, that was the best thing, because I knew I had slept. I thought, “Yes, I did. I had a dream.” Martin Reed: I noticed a few weeks ago, maybe more recently, you posted into the forum and you shared this really great analogy about sleep anxiety and how it relates to performance anxiety. You’re a professional musician. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Cindy Xia: Oh yes. It’s great. So yeah, so performance anxiety in musicians, or if you’re doing public speaking, I think it’s considered the third biggest phobia in the world. More people fear performing than death. I don’t know. Don’t quote me on this. No, it’s very funny. But yes, performance anxiety it’s very, very similar to sleep anxiety, because you feel this intense pressure to succeed in what you want to do on the stage, and that will generate anxiety, but often the anxiety will also inhibit your ability to do that very task. So it becomes this negative feedback loop to the point where you just completely crash and burn on the stage, and then those bad experiences will also make you obsess about future performances. Cindy Xia: And so a lot of people think, “Oh, well, when I’m on stage, I’m just going to try harder so I don’t make mistakes, or try hard to focus.” And that’s very, very counterproductive, because often leads you to fulfilling the prophecy. So that’s very similar to sleep anxiety, because the more you think, “I am going to sleep so well tonight. I’m going to try so hard. I’m going to have all these things ready. My sleeping pills, and my perfect blanket, my lucky socks, the temperature set at the perfect degree,” and I don’t know, “my melatonin and all sorts. And then I’m going to sleep.” And then obviously, the harder you try, then you are not going to sleep and it sort of all goes down from there. Cindy Xia: Yeah. And the thing when I’m coaching my piano students to get through performance anxiety, I say to them, “Don’t worry about making a perfect performance, because that’s actually nearly impossible, actually. Yes, you can prepare for it, but in the actual day, yeah, you really can’t control anything, really. You almost have to just expect the unexpected and you go in there and just play your heart out, play your music. You have to be prepared for anything to happen, and you will have to know that you will be okay regardless of even the worst catastrophe.” So I guess if you take that analogy to sleeplessness or sleep anxiety, the only way to sleep well is to know that you will be okay, even in the worst catastrophe, which I guess is having zero hours that night and tossing and turning and feeling anxious, and feeling horrible. You will still be okay even when that happens in the worst case scenario. Cindy Xia: Yeah. So it is very hard because it does take time to train yourself out of that negative loop of, I have to try. Because it’s very counter intuitive. It’s like you have to not try to make it work, basically. Yeah. So it’s quite interesting. Martin Reed: Yeah, it is really interesting. Let me ask you this. Do you ever think that maybe there’s even an advantage to some of this performance anxiety in terms of you’re about to get on stage and maybe you feel that adrenaline and maybe it actually, in some way, helps your performance? Keeps you more focused? Cindy Xia: It does actually. It does, because I mean, I love performing. I love it so much. You get to a point where no matter how… Okay, there’s a myth that great performers never feel performance anxiety. That’s not true. Everyone feels it, everybody. But you get to a point where you feel the performance anxiety, and it doesn’t affect how well you play. I know that I could be vomiting backstage with nerves, and having all these catastrophic thoughts of, “What if I make a mistake and I can’t recover from it?” I could be having all those thoughts, but I know that the moment I walk onto the stage, despite having all these physical reactions and the thoughts and everything, and slippery fingers, and racing heart and blah, blah, blah, I know that I can still deliver the best performance. Cindy Xia: And actually, the reason why I’ve been able to do that is because I have practiced performing under those conditions. Yeah, and I love performing. And now when I feel the anxiety or whatever, this performance anxiety, I feel pretty excited because I know it’s like, oh, it’s my time to perform. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The reason why I ask you that is because we have this belief that anxiety is bad. All anxiety is bad and it must be avoided at all costs, and often that’s when we can get caught up in it. So I’m definitely not suggesting that performance anxiety is something we should strive for when we’re trying to sleep. But what I’m trying to get at, is it’s okay and it’s understandable to experience anxiety. Martin Reed: And just like you touched upon, it really is… How we get caught up in anxiety or how we respond to anxiety is really just down to our reactions to the thoughts we have that generate that anxiety. And it can be so helpful to recognize that thoughts and anxiety can definitely make us feel uncomfortable, but they’re not a danger to us, and we don’t have to try and fight them, or avoid them, or suppress them. If we can just get to a place where we can acknowledge that these thoughts are thoughts, our brain is hardwired to generate thoughts, often it can be another way that we eliminate this struggle, and this battle internally, when we find our mind racing. And all that effort that goes into suppressing, or challenging, or doing anything with thoughts, the truth is we don’t have to react to them because they are just thoughts. Cindy Xia: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s one thing that I learned a lot about as well, that, yeah, our thoughts are just thoughts. Our brain is trying its best to protect us, but sometimes it has what I call an allergic reaction, which is reacting to something that’s actually not dangerous. And the best way is just to let it freak out a little bit, and just go, “Cool,” but I’m not going to change any of my behavior to face this threat that doesn’t exist in real life. Because otherwise, your anxiety will start to target itself, because it can’t really find anything else to target, so it will start picking on itself. And that’s when you get into a real bad loop, because then you start to fear the fear, which will will generate more fear. Cindy Xia: So, yeah. I read somewhere that… It was a really good quote. It said, “People with anxiety disorders… That anxiety is like discomfort, but not danger.” So it feels like danger, because that’s how we react to danger. But sometimes we can react as if there was danger when there isn’t any. And the key thing is not to change our behaviors as if there was something dangerous. We’d just go about our day, acknowledge that I’m feeling anxious, I’m thinking catastrophic thoughts. Cool. I’ll just do my thing. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah. Yeah. I think you made a great point there as well, where you say, “Often the fear becomes the fear.” We are fearful of experiencing fear. And I think the challenge is the brain just cannot separate real threats, like there’s a grizzly bear about to break in through the front door and attack us in our sleep, and just a perceived threat, like if I don’t fall asleep, some kind of disaster will happen tomorrow. So the body will react the same, regardless of whether it’s a real threat or a perceived threat. And then if we try to push that thought away, we try and suppress that thought, then I think the brain can be like, “Oh wow, you’re trying to suppress this thought. It must be real. It must be really serious. We need to think about it more.” And it just ramps up that intensity, and that’s when we can really get caught up in our thoughts. Cindy Xia: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Especially the thought of… Because this is I guess the most common thought of an insomniac, which is, “What if I don’t sleep ever again?” Or, “What if my insomnia comes back?” Or, “What if, what if, what if…” It’s always the what ifs. And these days, if I think these thoughts, I just laugh at it because I don’t believe it. It’s the same as saying what if I walked outside and, I don’t know, an alien abducted me? Something kind of ridiculous. And I just go, “Is there something I should be worrying about? Oh, nah.” So if my brain starts thinking, “What if you don’t sleep tonight?” I just go, “I don’t know. You tell me. It’s fine. Everything’s all right.” Yeah. Hearing the thought, but just shrugging it off. Martin Reed: Yeah. And I think it can be helpful too, to just recognize that the brain is always going to want to focus on or think about the worst possible outcome. Because at the end of the day, that is a survival mechanism. That’s why we’re all alive today is because our brains are hardwired to consider what the worst possible outcome might be to protect us from that. But then again, we get caught up if the worst possible outcome is often the least likeliest outcome. There’s often that thought that we have often isn’t that accurate, but really we don’t even need to get too involved in that, because these thoughts are just thoughts. Cindy Xia: They’re just thoughts. Martin Reed: We don’t have to respond to them. They can make us feel uncomfortable for sure, but they’re not a reflection of who we are. They’re not a prediction of the future. They are just little bursts of chemical activity in the brain. And we get to choose how we respond to those thoughts. Cindy Xia: Yep, absolutely. Yeah. Martin Reed: So we’ve really focused on the thought processing side of things, and you touched upon trying not to allow our thoughts to control our behaviors. So extending on from that, on the behavioral side of things. Were there any changes you made to your behaviors in terms of when you went to bed, or when you got out of bed, that you feel contributed to your kind of transformation? Cindy Xia: What I did was I compared my safety behaviors and all of that with how I used to sleep, and I tried to go back to how I used to sleep. I mean, I used to sleep atrociously, but not because of insomnia, because I just didn’t… I used to love being awake, and I would just think, “Stay up late and watch shows.” And, “oh, okay, fine. I’ll go to sleep. Ah, boring.” So I used to find sleep boring, and I used to love being awake. Whereas on the flip side, when I struggled with sleep, I found that sleep was amazing and I hated being awake. So it was more about thinking, “Okay. Well, what did I used to do,” which was basically nothing, “to go to sleep?” And doing more of that. Cindy Xia: So one of the things I used to do for me, which is not recommended for other people, but I like to lay in bed awake purposefully. I know they say don’t do that because it’s not good. But for me, because that’s what I used to do, I used to just lie in bed and go on my phone, and just relax, and just feel like bed is a safe place to be. You don’t have to sleep, you can just lie there, that’s fine. So yeah, I did that. I also did a lot of things that broke my mental barriers about how I thought I should sleep. So for example, I mentioned how I thought I couldn’t sleep in a hot room. Well, one night I just thought, “You know what, I’m going to sleep bad even if I slept in a cold room. So I’m just going to try and sleep in a hot room tonight. I don’t care.” So I moved my mattress back upstairs, and it was 27 degrees, which felt hot to me, and I slept that night. And so immediately, my brain just went, “Oh, you don’t have that problem. You can sleep in a warm room.” Cindy Xia: Other things like drinking tea at night, one night, I just thought, “You know what? I’m just going to drink a cup of tea right before bed.” Don’t do this with coffee, that probably won’t work. But a diluted tea, it’s fine. I just thought, “I’m going to do that.” Slept fine. And I thought, “Oh great. I can drink tea again.” And I guess my biggest one was sleeping next to my baby. That was a really huge thing for me, because I had to always sleep really far away from her, because I felt like she triggered my anxiety. But one night when I was feeding her in bed, I fell asleep with her, again, not recommended for safe sleep guidelines. Cindy Xia: So one night I fell asleep with my baby next to me in bed. And that was amazing, because I realized I had no problem sleeping with my baby next to me. So basically, everything I thought I couldn’t do, I couldn’t sleep next to my baby, couldn’t sleep in a hot room…. So all those safety behaviors, I broke all of them, and that was so big. It just made me realize, oh, the only thing that will make me sleep is being awake, being tired. Cindy Xia: And so now, comparing my behavior now when I go to bed, I have no sleep hygiene behaviors whatsoever. I do everything opposite of what people say you should do when you go to bed. Use your phone, go to bed really late. I nap as well, I love napping. I nap hours a day. It doesn’t affect my night sleep, because I don’t force myself to sleep. If I know I napped three hours in a day, then I just think, “Oh, I’m probably not going to sleep till 2:00 or something,” so I just stay awake a bit longer. Yeah. So I think it’s just doing the opposite of what your anxiety is telling you. And that really changed how I saw my ability to sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah, that’s great. I think first and foremost, you deserve a lot of credit just for giving yourself the opportunity to test all those safety behaviors and all those rituals, just to see if they really were helpful, or if they weren’t helpful, if you could still sleep in a hot room, or if the room had to be a certain temperature. Because just tackling that or running an experiment, just testing those beliefs, sometimes then you have to deal with that fear of, what if I’m setting myself up now for a difficult night? So I think you have to be willing to experience some difficult nights when you give yourself that opportunity to test these beliefs and these behaviors. And sometimes, too, that first night or those first few nights, maybe you will struggle, because maybe you’re paying attention to monitor for the effect of the change that you’ve made. So it might take a little while. But from your experience, did you find that the first time you tried to sleep in a hot room, or the first time you drank tea, or the first time you tried to sit with your daughter, you slept well, or did it take a few attempts? Cindy Xia: I think for me, I was lucky because a lot of it happened accidentally. So for example, the hot room, baby next to me one happened at the same time. And also, the nightlight was on. I had actually never slept in a room with any kind of lighting. And so that actually broke an old safety behavior from even pre-insomnia. And so I thought, “Oh wow, I can sleep with a nightlight on?” And so yeah. So a lot of them happened accidentally, which was really helpful. So once that happened, I thought, “Okay, I’m going to drink some tea tonight.” I knew the tea wouldn’t actually harm me, because I’d been drinking tea at night for years. Yeah, and then using phone. Cindy Xia: Yeah, so I think mainly because I wasn’t thinking, “I’m going to test this tonight.” It was more of once I had a little bit of confidence, I thought, “I’m just going to add an extra thing I used to do in the past and it’s going to be fine. And if it’s not fine, I don’t think it’s because of the tea.” Yeah. Martin Reed: Just taking a step back just to get the bigger picture here. So how long would you say this journey was, from your lowest point of struggling with sleep, to getting to this stage where you don’t even really think about sleep, or maybe you don’t even care about sleep anymore? How long was that journey, would you say? Cindy Xia: I think about four months. If you count day one as the day I called the crisis number, till the… Four months was when I went back to work, and that was when I found your video. That’s when my sleep got instantly better. But I would say that even during that time, I was having bouts of pretty good and okay sleep, considering I had a baby. But obviously, had a lot of sleep anxiety, and lots of safety behaviors. But I was obviously sleeping because I was just really tired, and I had all this medication knocking me out. Cindy Xia: And around Christmas last year, I decided to cold turkey my medication, my sleep medication. Bad idea as well, but anyway, I did it. And I experienced a whole string of zero sleep nights. I think it was just a withdrawal from the drugs. And that really freaked me out. And then that’s when I realized I actually had a problem with insomnia, because at that point I was waiting for things to get better. It hadn’t gotten better, it was getting worse. And that’s when I was like, “Okay, I need to do something.” Then I found your videos. I went, “Oh, okay, nothing’s wrong with me. I just need to do nothing, basically.” And then my sleep improved right away, I would say almost right away, but I would still have the anxiety. I’d still have those thoughts in the day going, “But what if you don’t sleep again tonight?” And I actually tried to not take note of how often I had those thoughts. I would say I would had them, I don’t know, like three thoughts every 10 minutes. It was ridiculous. Cindy Xia: Walking through the day like, “Oh, do you remember the time you had a psychotic episode because you were sleep deprived? What if you don’t sleep again? What’s stopping you from not sleeping tonight?” Yeah, and then that’s when I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is going to take a little while to go away.” Sleeping better didn’t cure my anxiety. It wasn’t that. It was more I started to remember my relationship with sleep. So what I mean by that is because in the past, my relationship with sleep was like… Sleep for me, it’s like a cat. You can’t get a cat to sit on your lap by chasing it. Cindy Xia: I’ll just be like, “Oh yeah, I’ll just sit down. The cat can come sit on my lap anytime. If you don’t come, it’s okay.” But then after I struggled with sleep, I was just chasing this cat around with a broom and saying, “Get back here.” And I was like, “Why am I not sleeping?” And then afterwards when I started to learn more about what sleep actually is, and actually realizing I couldn’t control it, and realizing that doing nothing actually just improved my sleep. And that’s when I was like, “Okay, that’s right. I used to just wait for this cat to come rather than chasing it around.” And so I think when my relationship, my core relationship with sleep changed, that’s how I slept better. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think that’s great. I love that analogy of chasing the cat around. I have cats, and I think anyone else that has cats will definitely… Cats do what they want, and it’s when we want them to do something that they do the exact opposite. And I think sleep is exactly the same as that. When we really, really want it and we start chasing it, it becomes increasingly elusive. Cindy Xia: Yep, exactly. Martin Reed: But I also love the fact that you described that there was still anxiety. You still were having anxious thoughts. And it also sounds like there were ups and downs. It wasn’t like every single night was better than, or as good as the last. And that’s really helpful for other people to hear, because sometimes we can gauge continuous improvement as a reflection if we’re making progress, when the truth is there’s always going to be ups and downs. The key is to just keep moving forward, and just try and keep on going. Cindy Xia: Yes. And I think it’s important not to use sleep as the measure of your success. It’s more of your relationship with sleep that is the measure of success. Because I have nights where I’m just not tired. That’s just how it is. I am just not tired. Or sometimes my baby keeps me up to 4:00 AM, and by that time, my body’s like, “Nah, you’re not going to go back to sleep.” And I guess it’s like learning to be in tune with your body again. And rather than forcing your body, saying, “Where’s the off button?” And press the off button, knockout. Our bodies don’t operate like that. We aren’t robots. We can’t just press a button, we can’t switch off. Cindy Xia: I think that’s the struggle with a lot of people with insomnia. They just think, “I wish there was just a button for me to press to turn my brain off and go to sleep,” but it’s not like that. It’s about finding that relationship with your own body again. And I guess almost like respecting your body, respecting that you’re afraid, you don’t feel like you want to protect me right now. You don’t feel safe and you don’t think it’s safe for me to be unconscious. Okay. Okay. I see. That’s okay. That’s okay. Yeah. And it’s almost like I’m letting my body just do what it wants. And whatever it chooses to do, that is okay. I trust it. I trust it will rest when it wants to rest, it will be awake when it wants to be awake. Cindy Xia: And yes, I mean I have nights where I get very little sleep, not very often anymore. I reckon probably once every three months, which I reckon is probably the same as the general population. And I have a baby. I think I’ve done amazing, honestly. I sleep so well, considering I have you. Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the nights was because we both caught a cold and she had a stuffy nose, and I just thought, “Okay.” But I wasn’t worried about insomnia. I just thought, “Oh yep, this is going to be a little bit tricky.” Still slept, so okay. Cindy Xia: There was another night where I think I had a five hour nap. That’s not really a nap, that’s just a sleep. But anyway, I had a five hour nap in the afternoon. And then I got to the nighttime and I thought, “Okay, all right. I think I’m fully nocturnal now.” And it was fine, I just got up and did some laundry and then around like 4:00 in the morning I thought, “Oh, I’ll just lie down a bit,” and I still slept. So it’s fine. You don’t have to sleep, just do whatever. That’s my philosophy at night. Martin Reed: Yeah. I love it. And I love how you just emphasize that really it’s just about a change in our relationship with sleep. To be one maybe where we just trust our body’s natural ability to sleep, and just let it do what it wants to do. Sleep might not happen tonight, or it might take longer to fall asleep. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe we don’t have to try and change that, or try and put effort into… Or just try and get involved in the process. Sleep is an autonomous process. We can make sleep more difficult, just like we can make breathing more difficult by holding our breath. But at the end of the day, the body knows how many breaths it needs to take throughout the entire day. Very few of us focus on making sure we get a certain number of breaths every day, so why do we need to focus on making sure we get a certain number of hours or certain number of minutes of sleep each night? The body takes care of this. The body wants to take care of this by itself. Martin Reed: Moving towards a place there where we can just be a bit more trusting, change our relationship with sleep. I think that’s the key to longterm success, really putting insomnia behind you for good. Cindy Xia: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I was talking to a friend recently and she was mentioning how, when women go through menopause, they often go through insomnia, because she’s going through sleep disruption at the moment, and I’m kind of coaching her through it. And we both laughed and we said, “Oh, we’re fine.” We’re all set for menopause insomnia, because what we’re going through now is just going to set us up to be bulletproof in the future, so I’m not worried about that. Yeah. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s great. Well, Cindy, I think this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on, especially with the little one there, who’s been really well-behaved. She’s doing great. That’s so cute. I do just have one last question, which is a question that I ask everyone who comes on, just as a way of finishing off the discussion. So I’d like to ask you that question too. And the question is this. If someone with chronic insomnia is listening and they feel as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, and that they can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Cindy Xia: The first thing I would say is I feel for you. It is so hard. It is hell. People do not understand how hard it is, because they think, “How hard is it just to sleep?” It’s the first-world problem. Maybe it is. So the first thing I would say is I really, really feel for you. It is absolutely horrible, and it can really bring you down to the worst mental state ever. But the second thing is, is that you will be okay. Your insomnia is not special. Your brain is not broken. You can sleep, you will sleep because your body is programmed to sleep. And yeah, you will absolutely sleep. It is not an easy journey. It does take a lot of time, because again, the fear response in the body is very, very strong. That’s why we are alive. It will take a lot of time, and a lot of patience from you, and you will have lots of ups and downs. Cindy Xia: And yeah, it is a process, but once you’ve gone through it, you will realize that if you can conquer this, you can conquer absolutely anything, absolutely anything, because insomnia is so hard. Yeah, people who don’t have it, don’t get it. Yeah, I always love talking with people who had insomnia because we can always joke about it. And I say, “Hey, welcome to insomnia land. How many zero hour nights have you had?” Yeah. But no, anyone who’s listening and who thinks their brain is broken, you are not broken. You will be fine. You will sleep, but more importantly, you will love being awake, and that’s what will help you sleep. Yeah. Martin Reed: I love it. I think that’s a great note to end on. So thanks again for coming on, Cindy. It was great to talk to you. Cindy Xia: You’re welcome. Thank you. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to The Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to implement evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques to improve your sleep but think you might need some additional support and guidance, I would love to help. There are two ways we can work together. First, you can get my online coaching course. This is the most popular option. My course combines sleep education with individualized coaching and is guaranteed to improve your sleep. You will learn new ways of thinking about sleep and implement better sleep habits over a period of eight weeks. This gives you time to build sleep confidence and notice results without feeling overwhelmed. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com/online. Martin Reed: I also offer a phone coaching package where we start with a one hour call. This can be voice only or video, your choice, and we come up with an initial two-week plan that will have you implementing cognitive and behavioral techniques that will lead to long term improvements in your sleep. You get unlimited email-based support and guidance for two weeks after the call along with a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. Mentioned in this episode: Videos: Get rid of chronic insomnia by getting rid of sleep efforts and safety behaviors Even if you have chronic insomnia, sleep drive always wins — you can sleep and you will sleep! Cindy’s forum post: 100% cured from postpartum insomnia 🙂 I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page

Listen to the podcast episode (audio only) When COVID led to Jake having to work from home he found himself working way beyond the usual nine to five. Jake found himself answering calls and texts at all hours of the day and even started to take his computer to bed. Work soon encroached into his weekends and before long, Jake found that he no longer had any kind of sleep schedule. When he took a vacation he found it really hard to get any sleep at all and this led to a lot of sleep-related research, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of worry. Fortunately, Jake’s sleep recovered — but only for a few weeks. Then, his insomnia returned and was even worse than before. Jake thought that his sleep was broken and that something was wrong with him. The good news is, there’s no real mystery when it comes to insomnia — from person to person, insomnia is remarkably similar. It’s often our relationship with our thoughts and the behaviors we might implement in a bid to improve our sleep that provide insomnia with the oxygen it needs to survive. As Jake learned more about sleep and insomnia he implemented evidence-based techniques to help build sleep drive, strengthen his body clock, and weaken arousal. He started to spend less time in bed, he got out of bed during the night if being in bed didn’t feel good, and — perhaps most importantly of all — he tried to live the kind of life he wanted to live during the day, independently of how he slept. Now, Jake’s life doesn’t revolve around sleep and he no longer tries to control sleep or put effort into sleep. As a result, he is sleeping a lot better and has regained confidence in his natural ability to sleep. Click here for a full transcript of this episode. Transcript Martin Reed: Welcome to the Insomnia Coach Podcast. My name is Martin Reed. I believe that nobody needs to live with chronic insomnia and that evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques can help you enjoy better sleep for the rest of your life. Martin Reed: The content of this podcast is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. The statements and opinions expressed by guests are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Insomnia Coach LLC. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied. Martin Reed: Hi, Jake, thank you for taking the time out of your day to come on to the podcast. Jake Zandi: Oh, thanks for having me, Martin. I’m very happy to be here today. Martin Reed: It’s great to have you on. Let’s start right at the beginning. When did your sleep problems first begin and what do you think caused your initial issues with sleep? Jake Zandi: Well, so we’ve all been going through this pandemic for the past, I think it’s over a year now since it’s hit the States. Yeah, I was doing pretty good with work and everything like that, working at an actual physical location. Once the pandemic hit, I think it was like in March of last year, I was told to go home. I actually just started the job probably two weeks prior to that. So, I had never really worked from home before and that’s something I’ve never really had to do. So, I didn’t really know, at first, I didn’t really have the discipline, you know what I mean? Of working just nine to five like my old job was. Jake Zandi: So, I got caught in, I want to say, probably bad sleep habits. This is what really first started happening to me. I was going to bed late because I would take work with me. I would take the computer with me into bed, which is a big no-no. I was answering phone calls or text messages in all hours of the day. So, basically, my nine to five turned into, when I wake up I start working until I go to sleep and in between intermittently. So, I was good for probably a few months. I was doing this working whenever. Unfortunately though, it started to bleed into my weekends. Jake Zandi: So, working from home ended up being on my weekends when I was trying to relax. I didn’t really have the downtime that you usually have from just nine to five, Monday through Friday. So, I just started working a lot and I think what happened was I was getting stressed out from work. I don’t blame anyone but myself on this one, because it was just me not having that discipline of, you know what, if I get a text message or if I get an email after work, work hours or whatever, I should just let it go and get to it in the morning. Jake Zandi: But I didn’t have that discipline and I wasn’t getting up early and I would sleep longer and longer, until before you know it, my whole internal clock was off. I ended up going on a vacation. I lived in the north east, so we went up to Maine for the weekend. I went with my fiance. We stayed in the hotel room and I guess what threw me off was I getting work text messages and all the stuff on Friday night into Saturday and I was like, “Oh, man, I told her I was going on vacation for the weekend.” But that ended up throwing me off a little bit. Jake Zandi: I didn’t think anything of it, but for some reason, that Friday or yeah, it was that Friday night I didn’t sleep at all when we got to the hotel. I slept like probably, well, I can’t say I didn’t sleep at all, but I probably slept like two hours. I thought, “Well, that wasn’t fun. Hopefully, I’ll be good for the whole day and I’m on vacation, so I want to really enjoy this weekend.” Then, it went to that next night, it went to that next night, and again, I slept like two or three hours, and I was like, “What is going on? This has never happened before.” So, I start to think about it more than usual. Jake Zandi: I’ve had, like anyone, a bad night sleep and I was even in the military and I used to do 24 hour shifts and stuff like that and never thought twice about having difficulty sleeping. But now, it’s just like, I don’t know, I freaked out a little bit. I started researching things. I was like, “How come I’ve had a couple of bad night sleep?” I just didn’t really identify that it was maybe me being stressed with work and being just in a situation where there’s just a lot going on in the world, there’s a lot of anxiety right now. We’re still living it. But yeah, it ended up snowballing into something that was pretty crazy. Jake Zandi: I ended up having like a week’s night or a week of bad sleep after that. I was freaking out. So, I went on YouTube, I was Googling all these things and how to sleep better, and how to fix sleep problems. It ended up being really … It became very stressful. Like I said, I’ve never worried about sleep ever in my life. I love sleeping. I’d consider myself a good sleeper again, but I was very distraught. I didn’t know what was going on. A lot of the stuff that I found online would freak me out. It’d say, if you don’t get good sleep, you’re going to have higher risk of cancer, or higher risk of cardiovascular disease and all of this stuff. Jake Zandi: So, I started becoming a little bit of a hypochondriac as well. It just really blew out of proportion. I was basically keeping myself awake and I was feeding insomnia with all these thoughts and ideas and what ifs, but it’s where it all went down hill and it stayed that way for a while. Martin Reed: So, when you first had those really difficult nights when you’re away on vacation, did it seem obvious to you why those hard nights were happening? For example, you’re getting into bed and then just finding your mind was freaking out about work or something like that, or was it just you couldn’t come up with any explanation? You were just finding it really hard to sleep whilst you were away? Jake Zandi: It was a little bit of both. It was a little bit I think it was because I was stressed out that I wasn’t able to sleep, but it was kind of, “All right, enough is enough. How come my mind isn’t shutting off?” Do you know what I mean? I wasn’t really able to come down from all these anxiety. Then, before you know it, I feel like the anxiety of work and all these other stuff, they almost transformed into, I don’t know if that’s the word, but it turned into basically this worry about sleep. Then, I really didn’t worry about all the other stuff anymore. Jake Zandi: I was like, “I’d get to that when I get to that.” I’m worried about what’s going on now, and it was just feeding it. It was a vicious cycle, like a dog chasing its tail. I don’t really know how to explain it. It was just, I could not get out of it. So, it got really scary. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think a lot of people will identify with that, like the dog chasing its tail, because as soon as we start to worry about sleep, that does tend to, unfortunately, make sleep more difficult. Then, sleep becomes more difficult. So, then we quite naturally worry even more about sleep. It just becomes this vicious cycle that you can just feel so trapped in. It just seems like there’s no way out. Jake Zandi: Yeah, I think another thing is, the harder I tried to sleep the further it got away. I couldn’t get sleep because I was trying so hard to sleep that it became … I’d be awake all day and try not to take any nap just in case, so I could make sure that the night was good. It was difficult. I couldn’t even really take naps either, because I was so worried. I was just so anxiety ridden, I guess you could say. I had never really experienced that. So, it was quite bizarre, quite bizarre. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, when you returned home from the trip, what was your sleep looking like at that point? How would you describe a typical night at that point? Jake Zandi: Yeah, so a typical night was, I’d worry all day. Then, getting home it was just, that night I got back from the trip, it wasn’t a good night sleep. It was me worrying about, “Hey, will I get a good night sleep tonight?” I think that was really the first night where I just really started to worry about the sleep and kind of freaked out about everything else. I would go to bed and then just lay there. I think what ended up happening was, and I’ll get more on this subject later, but I would end up going to sleep earlier than I used to. I’d be in bed earlier, and I’d try to sleep earlier. Jake Zandi: That would just in turn make it harder. I would lay in bed, like I said, I take nine hours and I’d usually sleep about seven to eight. That was my normal sleep cycle. I was just trying to catch up on the sleep, like hopefully it will just happen if I just lay here long enough. It ended up just being even worse. I think it honestly exacerbated it and made it so much worse than it was, was me trying to lay in bed. I was only getting three or four hours those first few nights being home. It was rough. Until I did eventually end up having normal sleep. Jake Zandi: I don’t know if something came up or whatever, but I forgot about all these issues. Oh, I didn’t forget about it, but it was like less and less and then I felt better. I think it just took one good night of sleep where I slept nine hours or something like that. Once I got that nine hours, it was like, boom, I’m reset, I’m good, no issues. There’s nothing wrong with me and I was good for about two weeks, or I think it might have been three. So, I was good for two or three weeks. Then, before you know it, boom, I had a bad night. Then, that bad night turned into more bad nights. Jake Zandi: Then, it was worse than before. It was like three or four weeks. It was just terrible. Most nights I was struggling to fall asleep. I’d have that occasional night where I got a good night sleep, but for me, it was mostly I could not, for the life of me, fall asleep because my mind was racing. I was wired and I just couldn’t slow down and relax, and it was bad. Martin Reed: Yeah. I think a lot of people listening to this are going to identify with every now and then you seem to get that good night. It might not be fantastic, or it might be, but you tend to get these other nights that are actually pretty good. You think, why are these not happening every single night? But the typical explanation, and there’s no real mystery to it. Most sleep disruption is happening or is being sustained because of the arousal system. We’re more worried about sleep or we’re paying a lot of attention to sleep, maybe putting a lot of effort into sleep, trying, striving. Martin Reed: This makes sleep more difficult, so we get less sleep. But when we get less sleep, our sleep pressure, that drive the sleep, the body wants to sleep, that urge to sleep becomes stronger and stronger. So, we can’t go indefinitely with no sleep, for example, sleep always happen in the end. So, when we have those better nights, it’s because our sleep drive has just reached its tipping point where it’s so strong, it’s overpowering all that arousal, all that anxiety, all that worry, all that effort, all that striving, so sleep happens. Martin Reed: But unfortunately, then you’re back at square one because now that sleep drive is being relieved, so your arousal system is back in charge and it puts you back onto that cycle of sleep difficulties again. Jake Zandi: Right. Martin Reed: So, this is why we really want to take a two-pronged approach by building that sleep drive, spending a little bit less time in bed or just an amount of time that’s more appropriate to the kind of sleep you’re getting. Also, sort of seeing what we can do to weaken that arousal system, so we don’t need to be awake for quite so long in order to get those better nights of sleep. Jake Zandi: Of course, no, I agree with you, because after a while your body just … you have to sleep. The sleep drive really does kick in. Martin Reed: Yeah, and I think in a way it can be a little bit reassuring because it shows that you can still sleep. You can still get those nights of a few hours plus of sleep. So, if nothing else that shows that your sleep drive system is working, your sleep isn’t completely broken, that you are capable of sleep, then you’ve got something to build on, something to work on. So, if nothing else, I think those one off better nights can serve as a little bit of reassurance perhaps. Jake Zandi: Oh, for sure, for sure. That’s something that I really started to notice, was eventually … At first, I thought my sleep was broken, like I’m having issues, there’s something wrong with me. For me, it was very anxiety based. So, it was basically me, my mind, keeping myself awake, and then my body was just always tensed. I wasn’t relaxing at all. I just really couldn’t get there. Until eventually I feel like I just wore out completely, just burnt out. Then, my body would just, whatever, head hits the pillow, you’re out. Jake Zandi: Then, that would happen, and that would be awesome, because I was like, “Wow, that really helps with my sleep confidence.” Yeah, that was really cool to experience that. Then, that’s when I did end up finding your videos on YouTube and ended up learning more about CBT and CBT-I, and I really think that that’s huge. With the whole sleep restriction and all of that, that was very good, but I don’t know if I’m skipping ahead, Martin. Martin Reed: No, no, that’s great. I think that’s a great point to move on to that. Like you said, you came across my YouTube channel. For anyone that’s not familiar with it, you can find it at YouTube.com/insomniacoach. Really, it’s these sleep related thoughts that we can develop and these sleep related behaviors we implement in response to difficult nights of sleep, through no fault of our own, because we want to fix the problem of disruptive sleep. But unfortunately, they can perpetuate that sleep disruption. So, in order to get our sleep back on track, really what we want to do is address those thoughts and behaviors. Martin Reed: If we can do that, we create better conditions for sleep, and we do that through building sleep drive, strengthening our body clock, and our good friend, the arousal system, we lower or we weaken that arousal. Can you tell us a bit more about any of the thoughts? You mentioned that kind of anxiety, could you tell us a bit more about any of the thoughts that you perhaps identified that could have been fueling your insomnia, or maybe you touched upon one of them, spending a lot of time in bed? Any of the sleep related behaviors you’re implementing in a bid to improve your sleep that on reflection might not have been that helpful? Jake Zandi: Yeah, so it really was a lot of those thoughts of, “Will I be able to get sleep tonight? How will I function tomorrow?” Then, there’s also the, “Is there something wrong with me? Is there something going wrong?” Then, that’s when a lot of it was, I was Googling a lot of stuff, I was watching a lot of videos, because I’m a big YouTube person. I love watching videos. I think it’s great. I get a lot more insight than just reading something on Reddit or whatever. But yeah, it was just a lot of worry. Jake Zandi: Then, you’d see something, or read something where someone is like, “I haven’t slept in a few days.” Then, before you know it, you’re like, “Is that going to be me? Am I going to be this person who’s not being able to sleep and then basically being bed-ridden?” It was just a lot of bad, negative sleep thoughts. That was feeding it. If you’re thinking negative all the time about something, it’s probably not going to work out. It’s not going to be a positive outcome. Jake Zandi: I never thought this would happen to me, so that’s why I was like, “What is going on?” I never thought that I would basically, not lose control of my sleep, but lose the confidence and my ability to have a good restful slumber, do you know what I mean? So, it was bad for a while, but that’s when I found you, and I watched a lot of your videos. I researched a lot of my own. Read articles about CBT-I, and that was where things started turning around significantly and pretty quickly. I was very surprised. Martin Reed: So, I think that the first thing that you did was reduce the amount of time you were allotting for sleep, is that right? Jake Zandi: Yes, yup. So, instead of going to bed early and then allotting nine hours in bed trying to sleep, physically trying to sleep, and before I get into that, I did try all the sleep hygiene stuff, it didn’t work for me. Some things, I guess, but that became ritualistic. Then, before you know it, you have to have tea at night and do certain meditation, and listen to this tape and that tape. Anyways, that didn’t really work for me and it became more of a hassle. It gave me either more anxiety about trying to sleep, because if I didn’t do one thing, I wouldn’t be able to get that sleep. Jake Zandi: But the CBT-I is what really worked, and it was that sleep restriction, which I’ve tried first. Instead of going to bed, I think it was like 11:00 trying to sleep, I stay up until I think 1:00, 1:30. I actually started to feel sleepy, naturally, like I used to, you know what I mean? Martin Reed: Yeah. Jake Zandi: So, it was letting go of trying to fall asleep at 11:00 exactly and all these other stuff, and staying in bed so long that I would go to bed and I would wake up within, I think it was a six and a half hour time frame. Then, I was able to sleep and I slept six and a half hours, but it did become clear that if I just got out of bed and didn’t sit there all day, I was able to start my day sooner. I was able to do all these normal things. Have breakfast. Have tea in the morning, or whatever. I usually do tea because I’m not really big into coffee, but yeah, I just felt like I was able to have a full day. Jake Zandi: Then, at the end of the day, get naturally tired, naturally sleepy, and go to bed. But yeah, it took me probably a few nights of just trying the sleep restriction until it eventually felt like I was in a groove, in a rhythm. Almost as if like my circadian rhythm reset and it knew when to go to bed and when to wake up and it was less effort. So, that helped tremendously, sleep restriction. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think that you touched upon it. It was getting that sense of really strong sleepiness back again, because it’s so easy to forget it, that sense of sleepiness, because when we have insomnia, it’s often replaced by this sense of fatigue, feeling worn out, just exhausted and run down. That doesn’t feel good, obviously, but it’s not a sign that we need sleep at that time. Jake Zandi: Exactly. Martin Reed: There is a difference between fatigue and sleepiness, and what can happen is when we go to bed when we’re fatigued instead of sleepy, we’re probably not going to fall asleep. Then, because we’re not falling asleep, then we start to get all those worries, “Why am I not falling asleep? I’m exhausted. I’m so worn out. I can barely concentrate. Why am I not sleeping?” Well, the reason you’re not sleeping is probably because you’re not sleepy enough to sleep and then because that arousal is kicking in. This is through no fault of our own, because everything we’re doing is completely understandable. Martin Reed: We want to fix the problem of this sleep disruption. Unfortunately, sleep is that oddity, because it response poorly to effort and striving, it is one of these things that gets worse the more we want it. So, by doing things like giving ourselves less opportunity for sleep, we’re still giving ourselves a good opportunity for sleep. I never recommend spending less time in bed than you typically spend asleep. So, we’re still giving you that opportunity for sleep. By doing that, we’re really building that sleep drive. We are getting that sense of sleepiness back. We’re creating better conditions for sleep. Martin Reed: Just as you found, it can just feel so good to get that sense of sleepiness back and that does help with sleep onset and it does help weaken or lower that arousal, too. Jake Zandi: For sure. I also noticed, too, is if I actually waited to feel sleepy, because I would feel tired, “Oh, I’m tired. I’m tired. I need to go to bed. I need to sleep.” Do you know what I mean? But I wasn’t really sleepy yet, so it was just, like you said, your mind keeps going and it’s like, “Why am I not asleep yet? I’m not asleep yet.” But the sleepiness, once I started feeling that again, I also started to care a little bit less and less each night about if I was going to get good sleep or whatever, because it was, honestly, the more sleepy I was the less time I had to think about it. Jake Zandi: The less powerful it got. I also had better quality of sleep. Instead of waking up multiple times of the night like I did before, and this is something I want to touch on, before if I did wake up, it was hard for me to fall asleep, but I also did wake up multiple times throughout the night. But it was, yeah, it was pretty bad at first, but I do want to touch real quick on the other technique that I did use when I had these troubles, when I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep, was I would get up and do something boring or whatever. Jake Zandi: Whether it’s coloring a coloring book, or read a book, just in a dim light, quiet area. That was just like my reset. So, I would do that as well. That was another technique. Martin Reed: One thing I did just want to talk about quickly, just with the sleep restriction and allotting less time for sleep, just waiting for that strong sense of sleepiness to occur. Another reason why I think it can be helpful is it shifts attention away from the clock as well, because often when we’re allotting so much time for sleep, like you touched upon, it was probably closer to nine hours and you were getting nowhere near that amount of sleep, is often you can have this idea, “Okay, it’s 10:00, now, I have to go to bed, or 11:00, I have to go to bed.” Martin Reed: Without any consideration of how sleepy you are because you’re so keen to get a certain amount of sleep. You want to give yourself that opportunity, but the problem is, the clock doesn’t know when we’re sleepy. So, if we go to bed based on what the clock is telling us, that could lead to some sleep disruption because we might not be sleepy enough to sleep. Also, if we get really ritualistic about, it’s X o’clock, so now I must go to bed, it can leak into our lives as well. Because then, we might not want to, for example, go out for dinner or go out to the movies, or socialize with friends because we feel that we have to be back for that set bed time. Martin Reed: So, I just think it’s really helpful to not only allot a more proper amount of time for sleep, but to really try and shift the tension away from using the clock as your guide for when to go to bed. Yes, maybe it can be helpful to have an earliest possible bed time. So, if you are implementing a sleep window, you can say, “I’m not going to go to bed before,” I think you said for you it was like 1:00 in the morning? Jake Zandi: Right. Martin Reed: But even then, if 1:00 in the morning rolls around and you don’t feel sleepy enough to sleep, it can still be helpful to just wait for those natural sleepiness cues to appear before going to bed. Jake Zandi: Oh, for sure. Yeah, it was just like night and day. Honestly, it was such a big change instead of trying to go to sleep. Because like you said, the clock doesn’t know when you’re sleepy. Another thing is clock watching, too, that would keep me up at the beginning, was I’d look at the clock, look at the clock, “What time? Oh, my God, it’s 2:00 in the morning, I’m still awake, what’s going on?” But that was all that sleep effort, I was trying to sleep, I was trying to get to bed at a certain time and stay asleep for a certain amount of time, and hopefully not wake up. Jake Zandi: It was just adding more and more anxiety, but having that sleep restriction and just staying up, like I say, I stay up and I read until 1:00. If I feel sleepy at 1:00, I’d go to bed at 1:00 and then I’ll wake up 6:30, 7:00, whatever it may be. Then, it would just get better, and better, and the quality of sleep would get better and better, because after a while it didn’t seem … Eight hours sounds good, but who really gets a straight eight hours of sleep? It seems very hard the older you get, especially. Jake Zandi: But the quality, I rather have six and half, six to six and a half hours of quality sleep instead of just sleeping, trying to sleep for eight, nine hours, waking up, going back to sleep, and having to do all these things. Do you know what I mean? The sleep restriction was huge for me and that really built up that sleep confidence again. But yeah, if I did have bad nights, I would implement getting up out of bed and then doing something relaxing, going back to bed, and usually I’d be successful in falling asleep. So, that worked as well. It was my reset. Martin Reed: Yeah. So, let’s talk about that, because I think it can be really helpful, too. Okay, so we’ve got a plan in place right now, I’m not going to go to bed before a certain time. I’m going to get out of bed no matter what at a certain time in the morning. So, another good plan to have in the toolbox is what to do if you get into bed and then you find it hard to fall asleep, or if you wake up during the night and find it hard to fall back to sleep. Often, I like to say that if being awake in bed feels good, there’s no reason to do anything, because it means the conditions are right for sleep. Martin Reed: But if being in bed doesn’t feel good, then it can be a good idea to get out of bed and do something that would make that wakefulness a little bit more pleasant, compared to staying in bed when being in bed doesn’t feel good. It sounds like that was a technique that you implemented. So, yeah, I’m really keen to hear more about how you implemented it and how you feel it worked for you. Jake Zandi: Yeah, so at first I was nervous of trying that. I was afraid to get out of bed. I was like, “Oh, well, what if I get out of bed and then I’m not that sleepy when I come back?” That wasn’t the case, that wasn’t the case. The first time I actually tried it, it did work and I was very surprised. So, I got out of bed. I think I must have woken up maybe three in the morning and I was like, “Oh, man, I’m up at three in the morning, I really want to sleep. I really want to get to bed.” It’s just one extra thing you have to do, but it works. For some people, it might not work, but maybe staying in bed works, like you were saying, if the conditions were right for sleep. Jake Zandi: But if I’m feeling wide awake, I’m not going to sit there anymore. So, what I’d do is I’d get up. I have an adult coloring back or whatever. I’ll color in that in low light. Actually, I have one of those Himalayan salt lamps that I have, and I’ll turn that on and I’ll just … Even if I stood up in bed that has worked for me, but usually the couch is the best for me. If I go out to the living room, it’s a different room. I can get that sense of being able to reset my mind, do whether it’s reading techniques, that helps too. I can even do a quick meditation if I don’t feel like coloring or reading a book that late. Jake Zandi: But 20 minutes is kind of like my perfect thing. I don’t look at the clock or anything. I just guesstimate. If it feels like it’s been 20 minutes, and I’m starting to feel sleepy again, which I usually do, I’ll head back to bed. Usually, what happens is within a couple of minutes I’m asleep. So, it’s like, the head hits the pillow, but it’s a good way to get out of bed, get back to a reality, I guess, you know what I mean? Instead of being in this anxious state of not being able to sleep, to be able to get back to a sense of, “I’m here. I’m all right. I can breathe.” If for whatever reason it takes longer and you got to do it again, it’s not the end of the world. Eventually, you will sleep. Martin Reed: I think that the phrase you used, it helps me reset my mind, was something that I just picked up on, because often when we spend time awake in bed, that’s when we start to ruminate. The mind starts to fire up, maybe notch up into a higher gear. We’re in bed, it’s probably dark, we’re alone with our thoughts, it can be hard to move away from that when the mind decides it wants to go into hyper drive. So, getting out of bed and just doing anything else can act a little bit just like a circuit breaker, like a reset switch, and help calm the mind a little bit more quickly, compared to if you have stayed in bed with nothing else to focus on other than those thoughts. Jake Zandi: Right, and it breaks that frustration, because after a while you end up going from anxious, to frustrated, to, “Man, I’m not going to sleep, tomorrow’s ruined. Blah, blah, blah.” Then, you start really feeding those anxious and negative sleep thoughts. So, yeah, it’s just very helpful to just get out, reset, breathe, everything is going to be fine, and just have some sense of optimism. That’s really what was able to help, too. So, that did work for me, and these were all tools that I can still use, do you know what I mean? If I have bad nights now. I’m doing a lot better. Jake Zandi: I’m basically back to before this was happening. But sometimes, I do have those thoughts here and there, “Oh, man, something big is coming up.” But yeah, that was very helpful, those techniques. Martin Reed: Yeah, and I think something else that can be helpful to recognize as well is, you might not fall right back to sleep just because you got out of bed. Even if you get in and out of bed a few times during the night, you might not fall back to sleep. Because we can’t control sleep, our goal isn’t necessarily to do something or to make ourselves fall back to sleep. Really, what we’re doing is just trying to give you an alternative to staying in bed if being in bed is just not proving to be helpful. So, getting out of bed, doing something else, if nothing else, it will probably make that wakefulness a little bit more appealing compared to staying in bed. Martin Reed: But the real bonus it has, and this is more of a long term benefit, is it prevent your mind from reinforcing this negative association between the bed and unpleasant wakefulness. A common symptom of that is feeling really sleepy before going to bed and then you get into bed and you just feel wide awake again. Or, waking during the night and suddenly feeling really awake, even after very little amount of sleep. Because your mind forms powerful associations and if we repeatedly spend a lot of time in bed and it doesn’t feel good to be in bed, our mind learns the bed is not a good place to be. Martin Reed: So, as soon as we get into bed, or as soon as we wake from sleep, the brain is like, “Uh-uh, we got to activate all the fight or flight response to protect you from this evil bed. This bed is a horrible place to be.” So, the only way we can really break that association is by only being in bed when we’re either asleep or when conditions feel right for sleep. We do that by just getting out of bed whenever it’s not good to be in bed. So, even if you don’t fall asleep that night, what you’re doing is still going to be helpful, by getting out of bed instead of staying in bed when being in bed doesn’t feel good. It’s still going to be helpful over the longer time, too. Jake Zandi: Exactly. That’s something I noticed, because sometimes if I would just try to go to bed, when this was all beginning, when this was all starting, I’d get anxious and be like, “Oh, no, I don’t want to go to bed.” You know what I mean? Because I had bad nights there, and some nights it was sleeping on the couch for me that felt better. I did notice that. I was like, “Well, if I can sleep on the couch, why can’t I sleep in the bed?” Because I created those negative sleep thoughts and then that arousal and all of that, it just became second nature without me being able to really control it. Jake Zandi: I had to do something about it. I feel like, from what I know, your mind will follow your body and vice versa. So, just if I’m sleeping on a couch, I should be able to sleep in the bed, no problem. So, I really just stopped using the couch for a place to sleep or whatever when I was having these difficult nights, and retrain my brain to know the bed as a comfortable place to sleep, the right place to sleep. I almost created like a, what is the word for it? It became like a haven, like a place where sleep happens and not a hangout. Jake Zandi: The bedroom to me now, I don’t go in there, I had a TV in there, but we don’t watch anymore. So, the TV, I’d rather be in the living room where I can watch television or relax and do all these things and then head to the bedroom. I think coming into the living room has been great because it associates the living room with a place to be awake and a place to relax, do you know what I mean? So, going back to the bed after that reset, the bed feels like the proper place to sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah, you’re making a really good point there. That’s something I think people are going to identify with is I thought that I was able to sleep on the couch, why couldn’t I sleep in bed? Often, it does come down to that conditioned arousal. We’ve conditioned ourselves, again, through no fault of our own, it’s just the fact that we’ve spent so much time in bed when being in bed didn’t feel good. Our brain is telling us that it’s got to protect us from being in bed. In order to do that, we have to be awake. Martin Reed: But if we are in a different environment such as on the couch, we haven’t got that association. So, we’re able to relax, we’re able to feel sleepy, and we’re able to fall asleep. So, if nothing else, the fact that we can fall asleep on the couch proves that we can sleep, as you had just touched upon. So, how do we then make that transition? How do we shift that sleep from the couch to the bed? I think it is a case of accepting that there’s going to be some sleep disruption in the short term by only allowing yourself to sleep in bed instead of the couch. Martin Reed: But if you only allow yourself to sleep in your own bed, if that’s your long term goal, is to sleep in your own bed, then by only allowing yourself to sleep in your own bed, that is where you will sooner or later sleep, because sleep drive always wins in the end. Sleep always happens in the end. So, if you refuses to allow yourself to sleep anywhere other than your own bed, that is where sleep is going to happen. Every minute of sleep you then get, you’re going to be in your own bed, you’re going to be reinforcing that more positive association between your bed and sleep, instead of the couch, or the guest room, or anywhere else. Jake Zandi: Exactly. That’s just, at this point now where I’ve done so much, I look at the bed differently now. Because when I started having these issues, I looked at the bed, like I said before, a negative place. I had so many bad experiences in there, not being able to sleep, having terrible days the day after. It just snowballed into, I don’t want to even go in the bedroom anymore. I’ll just stay on the couch and hopefully fall asleep. But once I retrain myself to sleep, and you have to retrain yourself to association things with sleep, the bed has become my natural place to sleep. Jake Zandi: It’s the designated place to sleep and I no longer look at it with that negative look like I did before. It seems like these thoughts, once you do that enough, these thoughts, these negative sleep thoughts, they start to fade and have less power, which has been really cool. I don’t know if I’m jumping ahead again, Martin, but that was something that was very empowering, was the fact that these negative sleep thoughts became less and less and less because I had so many good nights after these issues in my own bed. So, now, I’m having maybe less sleep at first, but I’m having quality sleep. Jake Zandi: I’m actually tired. That sleep drive built up all day and it was awesome. It was such a great experience to just come out of that and I was like, “Oh, finally, I’m able to get a hold of myself again.” After having so much bad sleep with bad associations, it was just reassuring that I was able to sleep again. I guess I look back and a lot of the stuff that I was doing was, I was making it worse by trying to go bed earlier and staying in bed later. Before you know it, I was basically setting myself up for failure the next night because I just wasn’t using any of the energy that I did have, because I was so fatigued all the time. Jake Zandi: I thought I was sleep deprived, but I don’t think I was ever really sleep deprived. I think a lot of it was just fatigue from the worry. It was doing more damage than lack of sleep at that point. Martin Reed: Yeah, one thing that I think is important to recognize, too, is just as it took time maybe for our minds to associate the bed as not a nice place to be, it’s going to take time to retrain our brains, our minds, to see the bed as a place for sleep and as a nice place to be. So, I think it can be helpful to emphasize that just because sometimes we can try these things. For example, we might decide, “Okay, I’m not going to allow myself to sleep on the couch. I’m only going to sleep in my own bed.” Then, after a week or two, you’re not really finding you’re making progress. Martin Reed: Really, that’s understandable because just like it took time for the mind to associate the bed with unpleasant wakefulness, it’s probably going to take a little bit of time for it to re-associate the bed with sleep and more pleasant wakefulness. So, it is really a case of just try to be as consistent as possible and really trying to take a long time approach wherever possible. Jake Zandi: Right, and it’s not an overnight fix. It’s not going to take one try at it and that’s why I really stuck to it. I wasn’t successful right away. Maybe that first night I was tired from probably the night before so I did get that six and a half hours of sleep and I was like, “Oh, that was great. That was quality.” But it takes time, because then I did have some nights where I was still struggling and still having the negative association, and then still worried. But like I said, overtime I did get … It did only take me about a few nights to start getting back on track, but in between there were some nights where either it took me a while to fall asleep or I was up at a certain time. Jake Zandi: But really, once you have those days where you’re not sitting in bed, laying in bed trying to catch up on sleep, and all these other stuff, and trying to take naps and all of that, you’re able to just really feel naturally tired and naturally sleepy at night. You just got to keep trying at it and eventually it will work no matter what, I think. Unless there’s something like a physical ailment or something like that. For me, this was anxiety based. So, this was able to really help, that sleep restriction, and being able to reset and using the CBT-I techniques. It was very helpful. So, I’m very glad I found these techniques through your videos. Martin Reed: Now, I want to move on to, we’ve talked a lot about things that you were doing at night, trying to create better conditions for sleep. It would be good for us to move on at some point to things you might have done during the day to help improve your sleep. But before I do that, I just want to check, was there anything else that you can think of that you found helpful in the evenings or at nighttime to create those better conditions for sleep? Jake Zandi: For me, what worked for me is just having time to relax. Actually, what I do now is if I had a really busy day, because sometimes I feel like in my more busy days, it’s harder to come down and relax, because I had so much going on. That’s just for me, at least. What I do now is I’ll have a designated hour before bedtime where I relax, I can do some meditations, some breathing techniques, some reading, whatever it may be. It’s actually very so much of the stuff that I would do when I’d reset in the middle of the night, if I had to go get out of bed for 20 minutes or so. Jake Zandi: But now, I really focus on mindfulness trying to really just get the brain to slow down, the mind to slow down. Because if you’re overactive in your mind when you’re trying to sleep, it’s just going to take longer. Eventually, sleep drive will kick in and you will fall asleep, but this is something that has really been helping me out, is just meditation, mindfulness, relaxation an hour before bed instead of doing work or whatever, having something that’s very exciting happening. It’s nicer to just come down before bed, and I have allotted myself an hour to do so every night. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think that can be really helpful, just giving ourselves that time to unwind. It’s important to emphasize that we’re not using that hour to try and generate sleep or generate sleepiness. It’s just some time for us to relax and unwind, and it can also be helpful to just make, because it helps make that period before we would normally go to bed. Maybe the times that we would look forward to were often the time that we fear or dread. So, if we reserve that hour before bed, for example, for just like it’s me time, I’m just going to do things that I find relaxing, I find enjoyable, I’m not going to do any work, no chores, just good stuff. Martin Reed: That period before going to bed can then become a time that we might start to look forward to, which in itself could just be a transformation in our way of thinking of the approach of bedtime. It also just helps ensure that we’re creating better conditions for sleep, just because we’re going to be in a more relaxed state. The arousal is perhaps going to be lower. If we’re doing things we enjoy, it can also maybe even just serve as a distraction. It helps us recognize sleepiness cues. Martin Reed: If we’re not wired in the hour before bed, we’re more likely to recognize when we are feeling sleepy instead of fatigued and tired. So, we might then be more likely to go to bed when conditions are much better for sleep. Jake Zandi: Exactly. I do want to bring up one point, Martin. An issue that did come up that I did realize, so once I got my sleep back on track, I felt like doing the sleep restriction and all of that was extremely helpful. When I got almost too confident, I start to drift away a little bit. What would happen was I would get too goal oriented before bed with certain things. It’s happened here and there, not every night, but it could be that one night where I’m really thinking about something about whether it’d be work, an event coming up, or whatever it may be. Jake Zandi: Those goal oriented thoughts will keep you awake, at least it does for me. So, it is good to have that relaxation time, that you time, but maybe stay away from the goal oriented stuff and just do the relaxing things you enjoy doing. So, that’s just one point that did come up, because there was a couple of nights, actually … No, there was a couple of nights where I had something on my mind and that kept me up. Then, the next day I was like, “Oh, no, am I back? Am I relapsing? Is this happening?” Jake Zandi: But no, I just implemented the techniques again and was able to get through that, but definitely having that relaxation time before bed and doing relaxing things is key to really help you, like you said, look forward to going, transitioning into the night and going to sleep. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. Unless you have anything else to add in terms of the night time side of the equation, maybe now would be a good time to move on to the day. Jake Zandi: Oh, yes. Martin Reed: Because so much of our sleep is actually influenced by what we do during the day rather than by what we do during the night. So, I thought that would be good to touch upon. So, on reflection, what kind of changes do you feel you made to what you do during the day that perhaps helped you improve your sleep at night? Jake Zandi: Okay, yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because this was very important and this really helped turn my bad sleep around and get back to normal, better sleep. Throughout the day, before, when I was first going through all these sleep problems, like I said, I’d never gone through anything like this before, I was so hyper-focused on it all day. It became that vicious cycle of, “I’m worried, am I going to get a good night sleep?” From the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, I was worried. This lasted or months, until I was able to implement CBT-I techniques. Jake Zandi: But now, what I do is I try to wake up in a positive, optimistic mindset, try to have the best day I can have. I exercise more now. I know it’s winter, where I am it’s cold in this time of year, so I’d go on my … I had a exercise bike at home that I’d go on and do that, do some cardiovascular stuff. Then, I’d go do work. So, in the morning, I wake up, do some exercise, go to work, try to socialize as much as I could with people. Do things that I typically would have avoid when I was going through the worst of my insomnia. Jake Zandi: I would avoid going out and that was huge avoidance. That was a way to cope, I guess, to, “Well, I’m too fatigued to go out. Too tired to do this.” I basically had to push myself and start doing my normal activities, much normal as I can make it, because we’re still going through COVID and things were still restricted. But there’s definitely that light at the end of the tunnel, but anyways, it’s just keeping busy, keeping up with friends, family, just anything you can do to really just keep your mind off of all the sleeping. Jake Zandi: Because when you think about it all day, you’re basically setting yourself up for an anxious night, but yeah, those are things that I do now. I go out, I have things to look forward to. I make plans. At first, when I was first going through this, I was afraid to make plans for the next day, or a few days, because I’d be afraid, “Oh, what if I have a bad night? I won’t be able to perform and go do what I needed to do, or spend time with people I want to spend time with.” But once I started to, and even if I did have a bad night, start going out and start making plans again and doing things, I started feeling more confident as well. Jake Zandi: I was almost looking at sleep as it’s good for you, it’s important but it’s not as important as I thought it was. It’s not going to keep me from doing the things I love doing. It was getting to the point where I was so sick of just worrying, and worrying, and worrying, and Googling things and watching all these videos and stuff. No offense to your videos because those were very helpful, but it was like, that consumes so much of my time before that I brought to bed with me every night. I worried. The worry was more powerful than having a bad night’s sleep in means of being fatigued and not feeling well the next day. Jake Zandi: I feel like I’ve come to learn, but yeah, it’s important to keep up and do the things that you love doing and not let this consume your life. There’s so many people that go through sleep issues or insomnia. Like I said, I felt very desperate at times for help and I didn’t know what to do at first. I didn’t know if I needed to go to the doctor, or get on sleeping pills, or supplements, or whatever. I was very hesitant, so I didn’t do that. I didn’t want to become addicted to sleeping pills. Sometimes they can give you sleep but not … Like you’ve said in some of your videos, it makes it easier for you to turn on that nervous system and fall asleep because it doesn’t generate sleep. Jake Zandi: Those medications just help with all the anxiety and stuff like that, because sleep is just natural, biological process. So, hopefully I didn’t go too far off topic on that. Martin Reed: No, I think that was all really, really helpful stuff. I think it’s so important to be as active and engaged as possible during the day and independently of sleep, not without sleep to control what we might do during the day for so many reasons. If nothing else, because one of our biggest thoughts that can keep us awake at night is concern about what the next day will be like if we don’t fall asleep, or if we don’t get certain amount of sleep. So, if we can just explore that belief by seeing what we are capable of doing during the day, even after difficult nights of sleep, we might surprise ourselves. Martin Reed: We might recognize that perhaps we do have some control over the quality of our day than how we sleep the previous night. I think we do have more control over the quality of our day, how we feel during the day than sleep alone. If we do things that we enjoy during the day, even after difficult nights, by their very nature because we’re doing enjoyable activities, we’re going to get some sense of enjoyment out of that activity. But it can be difficult, because our minds can be screaming at us to conserve energy, to not do anything, to cancel all of our plans because we are just not capable. Our brain wants to trick us into telling us we’re not capable after difficult nights of sleep, or after no sleep. Martin Reed: This can perpetuate the problem, because then we kind of … We’re often canceling plans that we might have otherwise enjoy it, so we’re guaranteeing that a difficult night leads to a difficult day or a less pleasant day. Then, because we’re less active, we’re not really doing stuff, then our mind has got all these free time on its hands. Jake Zandi: Exactly. Martin Reed: It’s going to want to worry, it’s going to want to generate anxiety. We might then want to try doing things like napping, which is going to reduce that sleep drive if we nap. If we can’t nap, then we worry even more because we can’t nap. So, doing good stuff during the day can really help break that connection between sleep, quality of sleep and quality of our days. When we can start to recognize that we do have a lot of control over how we feel during the day, this is not to say that sleep has no influence, it definitely does. But we do have a lot of control over how we feel during the day. Martin Reed: If we can break that connection between 100% of my day is predetermined by how I sleep 100% of the time, we might then start to put a little bit less pressure on ourselves to sleep. That thought that I must fall back to sleep, I must get a certain amount of sleep otherwise today will be awful. We can chip away the anxiety that kind of thinking can generate. So, in turn, we start to enjoy better days, and because we are a little bit less worried about sleep, we can start to enjoy better nights too. Jake Zandi: Oh, exactly. This is one thing that I did. I heard somewhere, I can’t remember now, I think it was a quote, but it was, “Don’t live to sleep. Sleep to live.” I’m not sure where that … I came across that when I was doing some research or whatever, but that really stuck with me, because you should be enjoying your life. You shouldn’t let a bad night sleep really ruin the whole next day, because you might be a little tired, fatigued, or whatever, but you can still get through the day. You can really get through the day and still have an enjoyable day. Jake Zandi: Even if it’s walking out, going to the park, and then just being out in the sunshine and enjoying the sounds of the birds chirping, or whatever. It’s honestly much better than sitting at home on your couch and just wallowing, worrying, because I feel like for me at least, the worry was doing much more damage than the lack of sleep. Then, regardless, in the end, your body always does generate that sleep that you need. If anything, you do get that minimum amount of sleep that your body will need to get through the next day. So, I don’t know, throughout this whole process, I don’t think it didn’t happen … Everything happens for a reason, I believe. Jake Zandi: I’m very optimistic and I believe in things like that happening. I think that for me this was, I wasn’t paying attention to myself. I wasn’t taking care of myself enough mentally and physically. This was like a wake up call, if anything, literally, because I was awake all the time. Anyways, it was quite the experience, and at first it was very, very scary, but in time in using CBT-I techniques, you’ll get that confidence again. So, it’s been great. Martin Reed: I think that just doing anything during the day, anything you can add to your day, even if it’s just something small, like a walk around the block, or walking out to the coffee shop, or anything that we can add to our day that we might otherwise have avoided based on how we sleep is helpful. We don’t have to be out training for our marathon. Just any kind of activity or anything we enjoy. These things don’t even have to all be physical. Just things that we are passionate about, that motivate us, that gives us a sense of enrichment, or enjoyment. Martin Reed: These are all great things we can add to our lives. If we do it independently of sleep, there’s never a negative outcome, because we’re going to have better days and we’re going to maybe put less pressure on our selves to sleep, so we might have better nights in response to. I think something you touched upon with that quote as well is, when we’re all on our deathbeds, hopefully a long, long time from now, we’re not really going to look back on our lives and think, “February 3rd, 1996 was a great night of sleep. That gave my life all of its meaning.” Martin Reed: Instead, we’re going to be remembering all the things we did when we were awake, that added enrichment and joy to our lives. This show us that really what happens during the day is far more important than what happens at night. So, perhaps if we can focus our attention and our efforts on living our day time life independently of sleep, then perhaps sleep will take care of itself because we’re then not giving it the attention, or putting the effort into sleep, the two things that can make sleep much more difficult. Jake Zandi: Exactly, I couldn’t agree more. It’s just what you do during the day is just so important. So, if you just waste away, waste your day and not do anything, you’re going to continue to have the problem. So, for anyone listening, it is good to get out and stay busy, and do things that you really enjoy doing. Like you said, Martin, even walking around the block, that can make a world of difference for the next night, honestly. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. So, what’s an average night like for you these days, Jake? I’m guessing you’re probably not tracking your sleep that much these days compared to when you were struggling, but just on reflection, how would you describe an average night? Jake Zandi: Well, an average now, like I said, I don’t really think too much about it. The only thing I really implement now would be that relaxation time at the end of each day. If I don’t do that, then I set myself up for a little bit harder time falling asleep. I don’t think about it as much at all really. I don’t talk. Some days I used to talk to my fiancee about it all the time, or my mom, I’m very close to my mom. I’d call her and be like, “Oh, I didn’t sleep good last night.” Or, she’d ask me how I was doing, or how I’ve been sleeping, but this is something that’s just really kind of … it’s irrelevant now. Jake Zandi: It’s something I don’t really worry about. So, talking about it less and less, thinking about it less and less. I’m now sleeping, I think last night I slept eight and a half hours, which is, that was pretty awesome. This is coming from someone who’s going through night after night of just terrible poor quality anxiety ridden sleep. But yeah, I slept really good last night. Then, maybe the night before that I slept probably seven and that’s all I want. My goal is to just get back to seven to eight hours and I’m back doing that. Jake Zandi: So, I’m thinking less and less about it. I’m worried about it less and less. If I talk to you about maybe a month ago, I’d probably still be very anxiety ridden. But I’m doing pretty good. I feel good and my sleep is basically back on track. It’s 99%, because you’re not always going to have a perfect night, and I don’t expect to always have a perfect night. Martin Reed: Yeah, I think it’s that shift in the mindset, which is really the key evidence of success, because when we don’t really worry about sleep, we’re not really paying attention to sleep, thus typically when we’re sleeping the best. So, if you just ask an average person on the street, “Oh, how many hours of sleep did you get last night?” They’ll just going to guess, they’ll think about it for a few seconds, “When did I go to bed? When did I get out of bed?” And just fill that entire period with sleep. But when we have insomnia, when we’re struggling, we kind of know everything about our sleep almost down to the minute. Martin Reed: We’re really analytical, we’re really monitoring. Perhaps we can use that. If we can recognize that there has been this difference, maybe we can use that as evidence that paying so much attention to sleep and really monitoring for sleep maybe isn’t that helpful. Maybe if we can just take an approach of, sleep is going to happen, accepting each night for what it is, shifting our attention to what we do during the day, and just allowing sleep to come naturally, because sleep does want to come naturally. It’s only when we crave it, when we strive for it that it tends to be a bit more elusive. That can be so helpful. Jake Zandi: For sure. So, it really is like that, it will happen, it will happen. That’s what I really got out of sleep restriction, like I said, it was the biggest technique that worked for me, it really did. Once I had a few nights of good quality, six and a half hours of sleep, that was better than the nine hours laying in bed, getting four or five hours of broken sleep or whatever. So, yeah, anytime I feel like I’ve reset, but you have to work at it. It didn’t come free. It came with having to implement techniques, but now, yeah, I don’t think about it really. Martin Reed: Yeah. Jake Zandi: So, it’s freeing, a very good feeling. Martin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Jake, I really appreciate all the time that you’ve given up to come on to the podcast. I just know that many, many people listening to this are going to get a lot of value from it, and it’s going to prove to be really helpful, but there is one last question that I haven’t asked you yet, and it’s a question that I asked everyone that comes on. So, I would like to ask you, too, and it’s this, if someone with chronic insomnia is listening and feels as though they’ve tried everything, that they’re beyond help, and they can’t do anything to improve their sleep, what would you tell them? Jake Zandi: I’d say, don’t give up on yourself and don’t, really, just don’t feed into the negative sleep thoughts. Try to turn those negative thoughts into positive thoughts. Really, really try to implement. I know it sounds scary, but try the sleep restriction. Try to reset as well. If you can’t fall asleep, get out of bed. Do something relaxing for about, 20, 30 minutes and try again, because you’ll be successful eventually. If you have to do it multiple times, you have to do it multiple times, but don’t give up on yourself. Jake Zandi: Don’t feed into those negative sleep thoughts. Turn those sleep thoughts, those negative sleep thoughts into positive sleep thoughts and eventually, you will reset. You will feel better. Get out. Live your life. Don’t wallow. I know it’s easier said than done, but I struggled for a while with this and I’m someone that would never have struggled with this, I don’t think. But with everything happening in the world, I did get very stressed out and very anxious about a lot of things. Jake Zandi: But in the end, just don’t give up. In time, if it takes you five weeks, or if it takes you six months to have the sleep restriction work, it will work. You’ll have that confidence back. I think that’s really all I got to say. Martin Reed: That’s great. Just because I know people are going to be thinking this, do you have any tips on how you might turn those negative sleep thoughts into more positive ways of thinking? Jake Zandi: Well, for me at least, having a positive day, do you know what I mean? Trying to turn, almost like I had to rewire my brain, it felt like, but if I went out and I had a positive day, smile more, try to just get out and enjoy time with friends, family. Yeah, the more positive things that you do or just getting out of bed and getting off the couch or whatever, and getting out into life, my mindset and my thought process became more positive in general. Jake Zandi: I was able to think, you know what? Instead of having a bad night tonight and worrying about it, I was like, “You know what? I’m going to sleep good.” Even telling myself, “I’m going to have a good night sleep tonight.” It worked. So, it was very helpful. Martin Reed: That was great. So, I think one thought that you can have which maybe you would consider one of your negative sleep thoughts would be something maybe, “Oh, if I don’t sleep tonight, tomorrow will be awful.” So, you’ve kind of identified that as a thought that is a challenge for you. So, then, you’ve put some effort into making the next days better, independently of how you sleep and then through your own experience. Maybe you’ve been able to turn that thought on its head. So, one like, “If I don’t sleep well tonight, I know that there are things I can do to feel better during the day tomorrow.” Martin Reed: That’s just off the top of my head. Is that the kind of thing that you’re getting out, like the way you can just transform your way of thinking around sleep? Jake Zandi: Yeah, that’s basically it, no matter what. Because for me, if I didn’t do anything and I sat around and I felt bad for myself all day, those thoughts would continue to … I’d be in this rabbit hole of negative thinking about it. Even if you just go out, like you said, do something, take a walk, go around the block, even something so simple like that, it’s going to really change your mindset. It doesn’t sound like it might not work as well, but if you get out and just try it, you’ll notice the difference. It really works. Martin Reed: Yeah. Absolutely. All right, great, Jake. Well, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. Again, I really appreciate you giving up the time out of your day. I think we covered lots of great points and I think it’s going to help lots and lots of people, everything that we’ve discussed. So, thank you. Jake Zandi: Well, thank you for having me, Martin. Thank you. Martin Reed: Thanks for listening to The Insomnia Coach Podcast. If you’re ready to implement evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques to improve your sleep but think you might need some additional support and guidance, I would love to help. There are two ways we can work together. First, you can get my online coaching course. This is the most popular option. My course combines sleep education with individualized coaching and is guaranteed to improve your sleep. You will learn new ways of thinking about sleep and implement better sleep habits over a period of eight weeks. This gives you time to build sleep confidence and notice results without feeling overwhelmed. You can get the course and start right now at insomniacoach.com/online. Martin Reed: I also offer a phone coaching package where we start with a one hour call. This can be voice only or video, your choice, and we come up with an initial two-week plan that will have you implementing cognitive and behavioral techniques that will lead to long term improvements in your sleep. You get unlimited email-based support and guidance for two weeks after the call along with a half-hour follow-up call at the end of the two weeks. You can book the phone coaching package at insomniacoach.com/phone. Martin Reed: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Insomnia Coach Podcast. I’m Martin Reed, and as always, I’d like to leave you with this important reminder — you can sleep. I want you to be the next insomnia success story I share! If you're ready to stop struggling with sleep and get your life back from insomnia, you can start my insomnia coaching course at insomniacoach.com. Share this page